A Big Old Pit of Fire
by Matt Rowan

I think it had been that way for as  long as I could remember. There’d been the sweltering heat of my birth, expelled into a world of vapors and vitiation, always with the sense that someone’s warm breath was on my neck.

It’d been getting hotter and hotter for as long as anyone could remember, on account of the fires that circled the entire country. They acted as a kind of barrier, too, but it was not fun having to deal with their heat, let me also say.