A Family Portrait

Sean saw lights in his sleep, deep in a meteorological dream. 

When a fire sends out smoke, there is water in that smoke. When the smoke rises, as heat will do, it reaches a height in the atmosphere where the temperature is low enough for the moisture to condense. At that level, the smoke becomes a cloud, much like any of the other clouds scattered about the sky at that moment. Imposter though it may be, it has the potential to create real lightning and real rain. Sometimes, downwind from a big fire, the clouds make rain and lightning that may dazzle and terrify ground-dwelling humans like any real storm. 

One day, the smoke rose high into the sky and reached that condensation point and the cloud bloomed like a white rose. "Beautiful," said Annette. They were laying on their backs on the open hillside, watching the fires burning the forest across the valley. "Maybe that's why snow looks like rose petals." 

Sean swiped some grey ash off of his jacket."Today it is snowing lodgepole pine." They lay there for an hour, nothing much to say but a lot to think. 

That day ended as all others do: the light was quickly extinguished and a darkness enveloped everything, a largely unwelcome event, judging by the wave of artificial light that sweeps the globe at night. This becomes so intense that the dark side of the earth has become luminescent at night, orange lights fired by the furious combustion of coal, gas, and oil. Cords of light span the earth, like a string of Christmas lights, like fissures in a lava field. Couples laying on the moon and watching the glowing earth above must think it is breathtakingly beautiful. 

Annette pointed and gasped, "Isn't that New York?"

"Maybe, but that light takes 1.3 seconds to reach the moon and maybe it's not there any - ah, I guess New York is still there."

"That's not romantic."

"Light is romantic, candles, firelight, we use it all the time to create a mood. It would still be beautiful." Sean put his hands behind his head. "Distance has a way of turning something catastrophic into art and beauty. The Lakota told tales of a night spent watching the light from the fires burning Custer's wagons. Beautiful light marking hundreds of deaths. Destruction became beauty." 

"That's not what everyone thinks." 

"But that's what they will think if they stay so far away. Get up close and in some places, you can't see and if you could, it would be soot, spills, and smog." 

"That's not what I see. Enjoy the view, will you?" 

Sean closed his eyes. The lodgepoles burned on and on, further north and higher up every minute, fueled by millions of other fires around the world burning extinct trees and swamps, fire feeding fire. 

A tree on the edge of the field exploded in flames. Sean opened his eyes. A siren wailed in the distance. He was at home in bed. "Where are we?"

"At home. Where do you think?"
"Where. Where were we last night?"
"Home, what do you think?"
He looked down at the sheets."The moon. This is where I am?" He pulled at the sheets with his right hand. "But New York was burning." 
"What? You okay?"
He paused. "I don't know. Something isn't." He looked through the window at the orange lights in the valley. A siren sounded in the distance. He pulled the curtains shut. 

In ancient times, sirens called men to sail toward their death on the rocks. Tonight, Sean was awakened by the sound of a siren.

He closed his eyes. "I need sleep."
Annette rolled over and faced the wall. "Amen." 

"I dreamt that the sun rose in the south." 

"It does in the arctic in the winter, just peeks over the horizon."
"No, this was different." He looked at her back in the flickering light coming through the cracks in the curtain. "It was like a photo bulb flashing. It rose suddenly and it flashed an orange light across the city. Shadows moved from north to south. Then everything went black again, it was night."

"That's what it is now. Home. Go to sleep." She patted him on his thigh. 

"And then it was lit up by us." Sean closed his eyes and drifted off. He jerked. He saw the flash again. Something like a large man reached over the horizon and took everyone's photograph, an instant of the world captured on film, forever immortalized while humanity was forever mortalized. The flash cast human shadows onto walls around the town, figures at work, play, and love, carved into concrete buildings and sidewalks. The negatives of life. The human family portrait, the last photoshoot. Sean walked through the colorless streets and alleys, kicking up clouds of ash, browsing the walls like an art gallery, with paintings of civilization, sculpted in portland cement, a 21st-century bas relief. Shadows of flat-shouldered humans, lines of them, led along with hooks in their jaws, arms loaded with electronics and toys, tethered to large domesticated animals - dogs, cats, and cattle - led by bearded warriors with hair coiled like snakes, long curled beards, swords, shields, brave warriors standing by a carving of the sun god, no bigger than a garbage can lid, the bringer of victory and lavish wealth. Next to the warriors were the dead, stacked like cordwood. 

The last wall on the block was a house like his, and the image was of a man and woman, charcoal black, the two of them sitting up in bed. 

Sean lurched up in bed. "It's us." The siren was still wailing. 
Annette didn't move. 

He looked at the window. Sunlight was coming through the cracks in the curtain. He pulled back the curtain. "That's not sunlight." He stood in front of the window. "That's not right. That's - "