Love in the Time of Global Warming

Prologue

The building has gold columnsand a massive doorway, a mural depicting Giants, with bodies sticking out of their mouths like limp cigarettes. Someone besides me has studied their Goya. Bank of the Apocalypse reads a handwritten sign. It balances atop a pile of ruin-rubble and clean-sucked human bones. I can make out doors and windows, crumbled fireplaces, tiles, metal pipes, shingles, signs that read Foreclosure. The homes of so many skeletons. People who used to fight over the last blueberry muffin at the breakfast table, get down on their knees to scrub bathroom floors, and kiss one another good night, thinking they were at least relatively safe. Now they are just dust in the debris.

I climb through the rubble toward the door. It takes a long time, time enough for a Giant to see me from the blood-red stained-glass eye window and reach out to crush me in his hand the size of a tractor.

My mother never foresaw this danger. She was scared we would get sick from drinking tap water, eating genetically modified fruits and vegetables, even breathing the air. We had to put on sunscreen every day because of that hole in the ozone that kept her up at night. She gave us vitamins and bought us only chemical-free shampoo, even though it never made my hair as soft and clean as Moira’s. I used to hate how afraid my mom was and how afraid she had made me. Now I understand but I can no longer be like her. I have to fight.

The ceilings are so high I can’t see the top of them, and the only light is from the red glass eye. All around me are vaults that look like crypts. The whole place is a mausoleum.

“Here she is,” a voice says.

Not a Giant but Kronen emerges from the shadows, wearing a carefully constructed suit made of patches of dried, bumpy material. I force myself to stand my ground. The sword in my hand looks like a needle, even to me, though Kronen is only a few inches taller than I am.

"You’ve come back?” he says, smiling. It further distorts the uneven planes of his face. “I knew you would come back.”

“I want my friends,” I say. “You have my eye. You took my mother. I want to know what happened to her, and to my friends. And my brother.”

“Friends are important. Brothers are important. Sons, sons are important.”

“I know,” I say. “I’m sorry for what I did. But you had your revenge. An eye for an eye.”

“What will you give me if I don’t help you find them? A stick in the eye?” he muses.

I won’t let my hand go to the empty socket hiding under the patch. I won’t think of how that eye is gone, how it is as if every work of art, every beloved’s face it ever reflected, has vanished with it. If I saw madness in Kronen before, now it has exploded like a boil. That nasty suit—it looks like it’s made of dried skin.

 “If you don’t tell me, if you don’t return them to me safely, I will kill you,” I say.

 Kronen pets the strip of hair on his chin in a way that feels too intimate, almost sexual. His eyes roll up in contemplation. “I don’t know where your friends are,” he says cheerily. “Your dear mother died of natural causes, poor thing. Your brother got away from me.” Then his voice changes, deepens, his eyes stab at my face. “And you could not kill me if you tried. Have you forgotten who I am? What I have made? What I have destroyed?”

His laughter turns into shaking and the shaking comes from the steps of the Giant entering the room.

Now my sword really is a needle. And the color of fear dripping through my veins? Like our old friend, Homer, said, fear is green.