Love in the Time of Global Warming Read Online Free

say. I didn’t mean to reveal so much … what?—shock? vulnerability?—but it came out anyway.
    “It could just be the U.S.”
    Just?
    “Or more.”
    My stomach tumbles. Then why am I here? Why is he? I want to ask him but no sound comes out.
    “You have to leave. They know you’re here.”
    Who? Who are these men?
    Something breaks upstairs. The big mirror above the mantelpiece? A glass-framed family photo or one of Mom’s drawings? Or maybe it’s the sound of my heart.
    “Do you know how to drive?” the man asks.
    I shake my head, no. I’ve only had a little practice and it didn’t go so well.
    “It may be time for a crash course. Not literally.” It looks like he’s trying to smile but his mouth just twitches. He holds out a cord with a key on it. “There’s a van outside. Diesel. You can run it on vegetable oil. I can carry you out of here. You can take the van. It’s stocked with food and water. We don’t need any more blood on our hands.”
    “This is my house,” I say. But I whisper this time. Following his command as if I trust him. At this point I know that screaming won’t help me anyway.
    “Why? Because you’re here? Because your family owned it? No one owns shit now.” His voice is harder.
    “Why should I trust you?” I ask.
    His eyes glance upward, toward where the other men are stamping and yelling. He spits into a corner of the basement. “Is there anyone else you know around here who you are going to trust?” Then he turns back to me and softens. “I started that yelling in the yard to warn you, if you were still here.”
    “Merk? You there? Found any fresh meat, man?”
    Someone is coming.
    The man, Merk, hisses, “I knew your parents, okay? You need to find them. There’s a map in the van that might help. I can try to meet up with you later.”
    “You knew my parents?” You need to find them.… “Where are they?”
    “Look in the van. There’s a map. I don’t know for sure.…”
    This man, he could be anyone, a madman, eyes and promises glittering in my basement.
    “Now let’s get you the hell out.” No more time for talk. He takes a large burlap sack and holds it over me—“Get in!”—but I jab at him with the scissors, grab the key from his hand, and run up the stairs.
    The painting of me, Moira, and Noey as the Three Graces has fallen on the floor. Someone has slashed a knife through my canvas chest as if to steal my heart.
    I fly past the big red-faced, lumbering zombie on the stairs. His cheeks bulge and squirm like there are live rats inside. I run through my house—where love once lived, and now death stalks with vermin—and outside into the gloom.
    Ash swirls in the air and the landscape is gray rubble that falls away into the sea. They kept saying global warming wasn’t going to be the end of us, that it was just threats from the fanatics, that we didn’t have to make changes. But every year there were more earthquakes and floods and hurricanes and fires—every element expressing the earth’s imbalance. Every year the temperatures soared and the ice melted and no one did anything. My pink house—no longer mine—stands on the edge of nowhere like a rose in a Salvador Dalí surrealist desert landscape. I stumble over what appears to be a neon-blue running shoe but as I kick it forward in the mud I see it’s got something severed and human-looking inside. Somewhere in the back of my mind I remember a news story about the feet in shoes discovered on the coast off of British Columbia, the last one just last year—people thought it was a serial killer but they turned out to be the feet of the drowned whose insanely durable shoes refused to decompose.
    Then I see a butterfly dart in front of my face; it’s like the one that came to my window. It circles back and around my head, then flies forth to where a lime green VW bus is parked in the wasteland. I run toward the van, open the door, and scramble inside. Men are running out of the house,