[Fiction] Climate Refuge

by Stuart Watson

All the trendy weather people warned about climate refugees. Millions of people, migrating north to escape the heat, the drought, the punishing floods from the towering clouds created by warmer air sucking from the oceans. A big fucking mess, and everybody heads to Canada.

That was how it was supposed to play out.

Then one day a decade after all the direst warnings, I went into my home office. A bunch of clouds were huddled in the corner, shivering. Pitiful moans came from their middle. Up on my bookshelves I saw lines of storms, tornadoes, hurricanes, even a hail of little green frogs. They were all crammed in there, trembling. Under my desk, row upon row of withered crops. A glacier sitting, seeping in my desk chair.

Over by my wastebasket, a clutch of what we once called beautiful spring days had gathered. I could hear them whispering. A dirty snowbank wept, oozing mud from beneath my end table. If the wild world could look scared, it definitely did.

I called my wife to look.

“What’s a tropical rainforest doing in your office?” she asked.

“Beats me,” I said. “When I went to bed last night, it was just books and papers. Now, this.”

I could hear a babble of voices. Caws and chitters. Low growls and incessant buzzing. Pine boughs rustling. Rain dripping from the tips. Tornadoes whistling as they spun in place. Oak woodlands shuffling. Frogs hopping back toward vernal ponds. A hot wind blew through it all, sand swirling and tumbleweeds … tumbling. Saguaros hugged themselves. A horned toad made eye contact, moved his lips. I could swear he said, “Help us!”

It was amazing. During the night, all the elements of the climate, all the magnificent features of the environment had fled inside, into our house. Whales and schools of salmon and ibex and kangaroos.

It was like they were hiding out, like they had nowhere else to go, in fear of some horrible force that would end their existence, banish them from the Earth.

It was like my office had become an ark. Noah? No way.

“Schlemiel and schlimazel,” my wife said, shaking her head.

I wanted to tell her she was wrong; she needed to pay attention. This was a sign. I was afraid she would think I was just trying to scare her. I had heard it many times before. I didn’t want to hear it again, but I was afraid I hadn’t heard the last from her and her conspiracy theories.

“Climate change, shlimate shange,” she would say.

“Refugees, shmefugees,” she would say.

“Global warming, shlobal sharming,” she would say.

How do you argue with blind ridicule? No time for that. No time for any of it, but here we were, me and my new housemates, my weather and wilderness, birds and mammals and fish standing at the window, here together inside because outside wasn’t safe, looking out, unsure but somehow knowing that we would recognize the end of everything, as it drew near, slowed to a stop at the curb, stepped out and sauntered confidently toward our front door.

Stuart Watson has been honored for his work at newspapers in Anchorage, Seattle and Portland. He has fiction in Bull, Yolk, Barzakh, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Bending Genres (Best Microfictions nominee), Erozine, The Writing Disorder, The Rush, Reckon Review, Sensitive Skin, The Muleskinner Journal, and others. Poems appear in The Muleskinner Journal and The Broadkill Review. Explore his work at chiselchips.com. He lives in Oregon with his wife and their current “best” dog.