She gasps as another plume of smoke blossoms into the sky across the water, gripping my hand until it hurts. This one is somewhere on Mercer Street, I’d guess, and another fire is already billowing up into the sky past the Space Needle, filling the hazy horizon with yet another black column.
The hot, gentle wind blows the hair out of her face, the sun lighting it ochre until it glows, backlit. The tears stream down her cheek as we stand in silence watching the soldiers make ground downtown across Lake Union.
I can’t manage to figure out what to watch, tearing my eyes between her in my periphery and the city on fire. The flag at the top of the Space Needle waves the new Evergreen insignia; it’s a defiant declaration of our new state, and a challenge to every boot marching our street and every naval ship haunting our harbor. It is the same flag that hangs out the windows of the skyscrapers lining Westlake, the balconies of the city, the same one painted onto the sidewalk of South Center.
“It’s really here now, isn’t it?” one of the neighbors whispers.
I don’t say anything.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
She stands next to me as I grip her hand like I’m trying to break it. Or maybe hold her bones so close to mine that the atoms that make up our anatomy no longer know how to separate. Kaylie doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t blink or cry — the way I can’t seem to stop doing — she just stands there, letting me break her hand, looking out at the city with that furrow between her brows. I can’t tear my eyes off the smoke unravelling into the sky across the water, my heart clenching at the sound of choppers and the hum of the bumblebees in the hive behind us.
I can’t stop looking at her beside me, that bleak, empty expression seeming to be the only thing that can pull my eyes away from the destruction before us. Her thin dress ripples in the breeze and I notice the slender pale skin of her arms, covered in goosebumps. Even though the summer sun doesn’t once break, and the rooftop bakes, and we all look shiny with sweat and grief . . . she’s cold.
I try not to cry harder. “Kaylie, you’re shivering,” I tell her.
She just wraps her arm around my shoulders like a brace across my body. Like she can hold me safe when the storm across the shore collides with us, even as she herself quakes.
“I’m fine,” she says hollowly, pressing her cheek to my hair. I can hear the nothing in her voice, the devastation that she is hiding from me and this rooftop. I don’t tell her that I know she is lying. I don’t need to. She is watching her home burn and I am incapable of easing the hurt of this wound, so I wrap my hands over the cold skin of her arms and turn my eyes back on that devastating horizon.
“Don’t worry about me,” she says.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
When we started to hear the explosions, even through our little apartment widows thrown open in the heat, we all found ourselves here, on the rooftop, surrounded by the lettuce and radishes and potato gardens, and each other in collected horror. We started growing the beds early last spring as a precaution — someone suggested it and no one disagreed with the idea.
Sometimes when we can’t sleep, and the worry eats at her mind, I’ll take Renee up here to pull the weeds that creep into the beds and water the tomato trellises until we exhaust ourselves. Last night we fell asleep right there in the dirt after the moon set, smelling like churned earth. My nose was cold even in the humid heat that had her body aching and sweaty. All I could think of was the way her limbs folded themselves so gently onto the earth of the freshly planted bed, running her hands over the soft dirt like she could feel the life trembling inches between her hand and the concrete. I hold that image in my mind now, watching the city burn as I hold her.
We’ve built so many vegetable beds over the last year that they fill the whole roof in rows, the thin bamboo trellises seeming to shrink beneath the weight of the sun.
“It’s been here a long time now, Sarah,” Chris says. “You’ve heard the helicopters. You’ve seen the refugees,” He gestures with sharp, exhausted fingers towards the building below ours on the hill, with its creeping kudzu and cracked bricks. It was abandoned a long time ago in the last economic crisis, the roof had caved in, now patched up with the blue tarps of the refugees making shelter in it. They’re all families fleeing the fires in the south, Californians and Eastern Washington natives begging for a spot on our still green shore. That’s what they’re all here for. A spot in the sun, a portion of the oxygen, taking what we declared ours by any means necessary.
“It started long before that. We declared war the moment we hung that flag,” Emanuel says, looking out like the rest of us.
Renee flinches beneath me at the words and I remember what she said the day they closed the state. They’ll never let us be a nation, she’d whispered in the dark of our living room, the sun having sunk as we sat still as paralyzed birds on the couch in the glow of the screen. It flooded the room in pale blue as she cried and I held my fist against my lips. That evergreen tree will burn just like the rest of the coast.
“Why couldn’t we just share?” Kamilla whispers behind us, devastation lining her voice. “I don’t understand why we couldn’t share.”
No one speaks after that. We just watch.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
I know what she’s trying to do whenever she takes me up to the roof at night. I know what she’s promising me when she whispers of the house we will build in the last patch of green she can find. I know what she means when she reaches over and holds my hands across the beds of dirt.
I know she’s trying to dream enough for both of us when I no longer can.
I know she worries too.
She’s just much better at making promises.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
Renee doesn’t let go of my hand as we listen in silence for the gunfire we can’t yet hear, the boots of the soldiers on the pavement a mile away, it goes numb in her grip and I don’t mind. There is only hot summer silence, the streets vacant, the roof filled with our ragged breathing and the stagnant wind and the gentle bumblebees in between each bomb detonating in the distance.
Kamilla, standing behind us in all her eccentric, beaded glory begins to cry softly. When I turn to see her swipe at the tear tracks across her brown cheeks, I notice her bare feet sunk into the earth in the middle of the arugula patch and I can’t turn away from the image. I watch as her toes burrow themselves in the dirt like they are trying to root themselves, like she is trying to find ground.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
Her arms tighten around me as she looks behind us at Kamilla, and the moment comes crashing down on me in breathless clarity. I know we’re standing on this rooftop, literally watching the world burn across the Ship Canal bridge but the feeling grows in me with a bursting kind of desperation. I don’t want her to stop holding me. I can’t imagine this moment alone. I can’t bear to imagine her absence.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
Another explosion goes off in the city and trucks roll across the empty canal bridge and the moment sends this kind of electric shock through my heart that I have to try to breathe through. That is what the whole cursed moment feels like except that, there’s Renee and the way her hair blows against my lips, and I can feel her heart under my hand and it is like soil beneath me. A home for the love blooming it’s way up my throat like a seed trembling through a crack in the sidewalk.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
“I want to spend the rest of my life with you,” I whisper to her.
She freezes and I turn around in her arms to face her, still gripping her hand like some painful, steady anchor and it takes her so long to tear her eyes from the haze on the horizon, the roar of the people already filling the streets of Fremont around us.
“I want to build a house,” I tell her and I know she knows what I’m doing. I’m dreaming for the both of us.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
I look down at her, looking up at me, the fear in her eyes now turned to a quiet steel. It is the same shift I see in her when we stay under the moonlight running our hands through the dirt. It’s a promise — to her. To me.
“I want to dream with you. I want —” she chokes, “I want to make you promises, and I want to keep all of them.” The tears spill out of her wide brown eyes. I brush the hair out of her face, the sea breeze coming off the Sound smelling like smoke and a city burning. Both of us are crying.
“I want that with you,” I tell her. I swallow the metallic taste of fear in my mouth. “I want every moment that I have with you — I don’t care how many we have — with you, I want them with you.”
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
I grip her fingers between us, looking down at them, entwined like inseparable tangles of vines. “I promise you all of them, then,” I whisper. I look up at her and see the worry that eats at me in the early hours of the morning reflected in her eyes. After a long moment I voice our shared fear, “How many will we have, Kaylie?” I ask quietly. “Will we have any after this?”
She pulls her fingers apart from mine gently, and her hands move to frame my face like fierce, steady roots across the landscape of my cheeks.
“This,” She reaches down and places my hand on her heart. I feel it racing steadily beneath my fingers. She places hers on my chest, my dark skin hot and heavy in the sun. “This is a moment.” she says. “Every beat of your heart is a moment. We have those for as long as we’re breathing.”
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
She starts to cry in earnest now and I lean my head on her forehead, my body gravitating to her like we are magnets and metal instead of merely fragile human bodies.
“I will love you even if the sky turns black,” I tell her. “I will love you if there is nothing—” Her breath shudders. “We’ll grow something together out of this wreck. We can do that even if we can do nothing else.”
Another echo of violence rings out across the water and it pulls us both back into the moment. We turn to see whatever destruction caused the roar, both our faces turned towards the sun and the smoke and the encroaching war tearing its way toward us.
“Every moment,” she says quietly, and I look back at her. “Every moment we have left here on this cursed fucking earth, Kay, I want to spend them with you.” She tells me so calmly, like there is no fear of the end. And there isn’t, not with her.
“Yes,” I promise.
I lean down and kiss her with so much gentle reverence, her hands framing my face the way she holds dahlias between her fingers.
We close our eyes to the cacophony of war shattering the city and I imagine the whole world as a garden grown by her hands. I imagine the kudzu consuming us instead of bullets. I imagine standing on this rooftop with her until the sky turns black. I imagine this rooftop farm of ours spilling out onto the cracked pavement of the sidewalk below, and the street, and the bridge of soldiers marching towards the group of us and growing until it covers the entire world.
I imagine laying here in the dirt with her, in the baking sun, until this moment swallows us whole.