The rising sun hangs a blood-orange fire in a pink haze. What once presented a beautiful sight causes a low-level knot in the bottom of my stomach. Almost threatening.

I wonder what today will bring.

A Corvette blasts past me on the near-empty freeway, tipping 100mph toward the ball of fire in the sky. I laugh and think to myself, 'Yes! race into the apocalypse, It waits for no man!'

The punishing heat and dead air sky have caused, like the moon, a crazy aesthetic in people. Anxiety so thick, like breathing hot steam.

Customers at check-out counters, screaming
Erratic driving
Psyches morphing, twisting, assuming startling forms on social media
Lost, drifting souls on the streets. Faces have set jaws and lips pursed into hyphens.
Nervous

On the way home I watch out the window at a humanity that has slowed its activity in the impossible heat. I drive over the overpass and a pigeon flies off of the freeway sign directly into the street.

Her strength sapped, she banks recklessly, she tries.

I suck in a startled breath. She slams into the grill of my car and becomes a lump in the rearview mirror, smaller and smaller.

The knot in the pit of my stomach rises. I grip the steering column until my knuckles turn sheet white. Her sudden violent death seemed an omen.

The omen of a new day. A Nervous new day. I wonder if I will ever again see the cool, scented sanity of the Harvest Season.