the murdering earth

The smothering heat wrapped around like the end of a long and uninteresting story. It had been over three weeks, four days, and seven hours since the thermometer had risen above 130 degrees and we were just about getting used to it. The nights spent in water, the days in the only refrigerator left working in the county… skins blistered as they changed color from pink to purple to brown to a nice crusty dark color that we had never seen before. The mayor had taken to shoveling the sand… about six feet deep… he said to find a cool spot, but his trenches looked uncomfortably like graves. Everyday the scouts would report back on the wire that they had travelled another hundred miles north and still hadn’t found temps under 120. The whole globe had been set on fire… it was burning with the vengeful hate of an extremely vapid reality show persona. And that is exactly what we thought… that the Earth was angry… pissed… vengeful… that it had finally reach the point were all the ripping and stabbing and mindless polluting was more than we could reasonably ask it to endure. Mother Earth was killing us…