The sky shone blue but in the fire of summer sun, too long since rain, burned hot and harsh without wind. Ryan was already sweating, and staring on the world, all he could see were sign of settling drought as the means to a livelihood went dormant or outright died.
It was all a cycle, dry years to be taken into scope and balance with the wet; and it was not change as those who live in an artificial ideal of consistency decry but cycle known by those who live in the world and learn fast that normal is an ideal that never really lives but measures somewhere between extremes.
Emma and Ryan rested in the shade of a white oak, its scratched bark pale, almost white, in the brightness of the sun, and its canopy shone still deep green from a distance, with its undersides of leaves pale, gray like bark of the tree, when viewed upward from beneath.
They held in the shadow, sheltered from the harshness of a, for a time, fixed heat that stressed their world around.
Ryan smiled with a meekness as she rested beside him in the shadow of the great oak. The tree had lived many cycles and centuries; times that preceded and would continue centuries after Ryan and Emma were returned to earth—if the cultivated wilds were not converted to commercial cancer and made strip mall and neighborhood that filled for decades and laid empty and unkept after: cement wilderness without restorative power, only the restlessness of places abandoned to neglect.
Staring on the burning world, Ryan thought on the cultured world, how it sustained its rich years and droughts—from different source—and how the world of money, capital, and materialism was thinning too: stresses of a pressure all could feel, no one could see, nor change despite the academic and social rain dances and songs conducted in hope and half-hearted, disbelieving promise of reprieve.
The world would stay in drought until God sent reprieve in a needed rain and break in stability of fixed blue sky.
It was all a cycle. God would return the bounty, but today, there was only heat that drove all into shadow and sanctuary from unbearable blue.
“What are you thinking?” Emma asked as Ryan shook his head and wiped sweat from his brow.
“The world’s about to burn. It’s too fucking hot…”