God, my eyes are killing me. How do people live like this? It’s worse than allergies. Worse than that sandstorm, even. I woke up this morning and my eyes were *stinging* and I couldn’t figure out why. My throat was burning too, so I thought, am I getting a cold? Strep? Then I looked out my windows as I was getting dressed, and the light looked . . . weird. Kind of golden, like sunset, even though it was nine in the morning.
Arthur stopped by for lunch and told us about the fires—all this golden haze means that somewhere out there, the fields and forests are burning.
“Out there?” I said. “What about the town? Will it . . . ?”
The rest of the thought is too scary to finish, but Arthur smiled and shook his head. “No, they’re really far away now,” he said. “Hundreds of miles, in fact, but the wind is so strong, it sweeps the ash and debris over to us. But there’s no danger here. Not now, anyway.”
I wanted to know how it started. A cigarette butt? A campfire? But Arthur says it’s not that simple, it could be almost anything. Sometimes it starts with a lightning strike. Sometimes the farm machinery shoots off a spark from metal rubbing metal. And that’s all it takes. The next thing you know, the fields are blazing.