Member-only story
First Rule of Summer in Argentina: Clean Up Your Freezer
This is not Europe.
I didn’t write yesterday, for one reason: heatwave.
I spent the morning with some short fiction, trying to work my way through a story for a Vocal writing challenge. Then, to the gym for a light leg day workout. The temperature was 30 degrees Celsius, or 86 Fahrenheit, at 8 am, and quickly rising.
After I’d prepared lunch, I sat down to eat and check out my day job work for the day.
Bam. Lights out. A nearly city-wide blackout. Nowhere to go to escape it, because everyone I knew was without power, too.
What are we, Texas?
I spent the day lying in my bed in 104 degrees, with an ice pack over my stomach to cool me off. When the lights came back on in my building, it had been six hours without light in extreme, record-breaking heat, for most of the city. Six hours for everything in your freezer to melt. And I’m a vegan, so there’s a whole lot of beans there.
Oh, and when you don’t have light, you don’t have water, either, so you can forget about that shower to cool off.
And as the sun set, a cloud of smoke from nearby forest fires set over the city, making it that much harder to keep the windows open to let in the night breeze.
