SmokeLong Quarterly

Judy Blume prepared me for first periods and first loves—not these rising muddy waters filling the streets like an open mouth beneath the sepia-tone sky tinged gray like food that’s rotted before you can swallow. I reread Summer Sisters every year. Every summer since my mother brought home the book-on-tape from the library thinking it was another classic YA Judy Blume about a girl on the precipice of teenagerhood. It wasn’t. And of course my mother walked in right at the part where the menopausal aunt is thinking about grabbing her vibrator and imagining Fish Boy’s lips between her legs. What are you listening to? My mother asked and I told her she was the one who picked the book out at the library. Judy Blume didn’t hide the fact that women want—and they don’t stop wanting either. No, they feel heartbreak and lust and relentless grief but also summer nights are sultry and friendship can be a life saver, can be forever, if you let it.

The thunder cracks next to me. I pause my Summer Sisters audiobook and take my headphones off. I’m right at the beginning of the story—again. The sky flickers pale purple with lightning. It sounds like a demolition like a crane swinging into a building and I put my hands around my ears and duck down against the glass of the bus shelter where I’m waiting. I press my hands into my ears and I’m scared and I think, maybe, for the first time, or maybe not for the first time, that I might die. The water is rising and maybe the electrical current from the lightning will get me or one of the cars won’t be able to stop and will tailspin right into me. I remember that line from Summer Sisters at the prologue If the bacteria don’t get you, the preservatives will. I remember now that the story opens in the 1990s with a summer heat wave, and the hottest summer on record, and the AIDS crisis, and before that the protagonist, Vix, watched the Challenger Space Shuttle blow up on live TV.

Maybe, in a lot of ways, the world has always felt like it’s ending.

Judy Blume novels taught me that having a body can feel pressing, unwieldy. Maybe Judy Blume was right. Because now my body is all I can think about because maybe I’m too disabled to live in this climate-changed world, to survive in a world so hell-bent on destruction, this planet captained by a species so unwilling to save itself. Every year we reach a point of no return and then another and then another after that. Now there’s sirens all around me and I’m stuck in the bus shelter and the sky is green now and I’ve never seen the sky turn ugly-green like that and all I know is that I need to go inside but also thunder and lightning is crackling down around me and I’m covering my ears and I’m waiting for my partner to come get me and I can’t move and I think maybe I’ll die in this bus shelter while the water rises and I’ve never been so close to lightning and I’ve never seen the sky turn ugly-green like that.

There’s a scene in Summer Sisters in 1980s where there’s another heatwave and characters turn the garden hose on themselves and it’s so hot Vix and Caitlin, who’ve dubbed themselves Summer Sisters, swim in a dirty pond and I’m clinging to the bus garage like it might be a life raft because I cannot wade through the water pooling around the curbs. I remember I had a dream about Caitlin once. Caitlin was floating on a piece of driftwood hanging on for dear life in the ocean, her beautiful blonde hair flying in the wind, kicking her legs just to stay afloat. I cannot save myself I cannot get across the street and into my home. I realize the world will let me die. Lightning splits the sky wide open.

My partner retrieves me from the bus shelter, has waded across the street and says we need to get inside. And I say I’m sorry over and over again I’m sorry for having you come get me I’m sorry that you had to come get me I’m sorry you had to come get me. My partner grips my hand so tight it turns white when we cross the street, when we move through the water and we do not use the umbrella because the lightning’s coming down around us and we have to get inside, my partner keeps saying. Stop saying that, I say back. I know we have to get inside. I’m scared, I repeat until we make it to the other side. I’m scared.

I reread Summer Sisters every summer since we brought the book-on-tape home from the library. Every year it splits my heart wide open. Caitlin marries the love of Vix’s life. And they stay friends anyways—through babies and losses and divorces. Every year the ending shocks me. Because every time, I think, maybe, somehow, the ending will be different this time. Caitlin goes out sailing in the ocean and she doesn’t come back and they don’t know if she’s dead or alive. Maybe she’s dead and maybe I’ll die out here in this storm. I don’t, though. We make it inside—cold, wet, scared—alive.

_________________________________

“Judy Blume Didn’t Prepare Me for the Apocalypse” is the winner of the flash CNF competition of A SmokeLong Summer 25.