The World is on Fire and You’re Out of Milk
by Rhiannon A Grist
You’d just pulled off your flame-retardant boots when you realised you’d forgotten the milk.
You’re tired from work and all you want is a coffee, a cup of warm milk poured over a homemade double shot. You check the fridge—just in case—but it’s true, you’re out. Things are bad enough. Now you have to head back out, and just after you changed out of your boiler suit.
This is unbearable! you think, but only to yourself. Because it would feel like a sin, even here in your own home, to say it out loud. Because, despite everything, it is bearable. Everything is treacherously bearable.
And because you can bear it, back out for milk you must go.
You spread a fresh layer of ointment onto your cheeks and forearms. You pull on your Teflon undershirt and strap back into your boiler suit. You fit your oxygen mask—the stickers you used to decorate it in the beginning have all but burned off—and you set off.
The heat hits you the moment you open the door of your apartment building. It’s not too bad today.
Some days it’s a dry heat and the hairs on your arms turn crisp and brittle.
Some days the sweat pools in the corners of your eyes and runs down the bare road of your back.
And some days you’re the one burning. You burn from the inside out with more wrath and frustration than you know what to do with, so you hold on until you get home and douse yourself off in a cold shower and scream into your hands.
But today it’s just a constant throbbing heat. A rash, a discomfort. At least your flat has a decent cooling system. At least you managed to get that together before the world burst into flames.
The nearest shop is only five minutes’ walk away, but the orange haze filling the street makes it feel so much further. You don’t want to be out here. You want to be at home with your coffee and your Netflix. You hate having to see it up close, the state of it all.
The houses blackened with soot and scorch marks.
The pavement littered with ash.
The air filled with smog.
The flames licking up drainpipes.
The trees in the park smouldering like dragon’s teeth.
And—is that a stone in your boot?
For Christs’ sake! It’s right by the heel too. If only you could shake it down into the toe or even the arch, but it’s stuck in the lining that stops the pavement blistering the soles of your feet.
First the milk. Now a stone. Fantastic.
Would it be so bad? Drinking your coffee black? All you’d need is hot water and you’ve got plenty of that these days—har har. How do you always run out of milk so quickly anyway?
Do you use too much in your porridge?
Were the shops making the cartons smaller?
Maybe it evaporated somehow. You wouldn’t put it past the fire to evaporate milk out of spite.
You briefly consider giving up.
You go on.
Down by the wall outside your local shop hunkers a man with a foil sheet wrapped round his head and shoulders. This is not the first person you’ve seen caught outside with minimum protection. He clutches an empty water bottle and a twisted tube of ointment. The pads of his fingers are red raw. Why doesn’t he go inside the shop? Is he waiting for someone? Was he thrown out?
You should probably ask if he’s ok.
You don’t.
You step into the vacuum chamber at the shop’s entrance. After the hiss of re-pressurisation, you step into the clean bright aisles, slip off your mask and head to the dairy section. Row upon row of cold sweating cartons line up before you, a sterile forest of cool white comfort ready to smother the heat outside.
Sometimes, you fantasise about taking a nap on the two litre jugs on the lower shelf. you imagine your clothes blooming with damp, condensation gathering in dewdrops on your skin, breath rising in small white clouds in front of your eyes. What luxury. What unrivalled decadence! To think there was once a time when you could have jumped into a mountain lake or rolled in snow. It feels unbelievable now. Like you made it up or saw it in a dream.
You remember when the smell of smoke would ignite a warm, peppery excitement in the pit of your belly. How it would make you think of summer evenings on a pebbled beach, sat round a glowing fire pit tucked into the cliff side, mouth laced with flat cider, hair thick with sea salt. How the smell would keep the memory of those magic nights alive for a day or two in the cuffs of your jumper. Now you dream of bed-sized fridges, frozen wastes and biblical monsoons.
You resist the urge to climb into the chiller and pick up a carton of milk instead.
The shelves closest to the self-checkout are stacked with bottled water and travel-sized tubes of ointment. Next to them there’s a table set up with leaflets and stickers. Looks like another dousing drive. On Saturday, a group of about fifty to a hundred locals will fill up buckets, bottles, bags and basins from their taps at home then go out to the park and pour water over the fires. You’ve been to a few yourself, in the beginning. You know what will happen. The flames will die down for a few hours, and then the water will dry off and a new spark will set everything alight again. No one knows how to stop the sparks for good, but they’ll keep holding dousing drives anyway.
At least it’s something.
The person manning the stall looks up and catches your eye. A flash of recognition flickers over their face. You stop in your tracks. You know them. You went to university with them. You used to hang out at the same ramshackle pubs and drink the same cheap wine. There was even a time on that pebbled beach, round the fire pit tucked into the cliff, when you both talked about how you were going to change the world.
The memory of once believing the world could be changed hits a little harder than you’d like.
You realise that in all your late-night plotting and all your beer mat manifestos, you never once thought that one day the world might erupt into flames. A lot has changed. You’ve changed. You got tired.
Meanwhile they, your old friend on the dousing stand, have only become more. More passionate. More determined. And, now you think of it, more annoying. Yes. They annoy you. Their passion feels accusatory somehow. As if it’s your fault the world is on fire. As if you knowingly chose this. You imagine them looking at you, their eyes traveling down your arm, to your hand, to the cold wet carton of milk. You imagine them frowning and thinking:
Where are you taking that milk? Shouldn’t you use it to douse the flames? Don’t you want to help put out the fires? Is your coffee really more important than the world?
But they’re not the one thinking this.
You are.
You add a bottle of water from the shelves to your shopping and tuck it all into your triple-lined tote bag.
Luckily for you, your old friend is busy talking to some students. They probably haven’t got time to catch up with you, and you don’t really want to hear what you should be doing to fix things. Not right now. Not today. Not after the milk. And the stone. You give them a friendly wave—just in case they heard you thinking before—and slip back out into the flaming world before they have a chance to say a word.
Outside the shop the man is gone; his foil sheet flutters against a drain pipe. You hope this means he’s gone inside.
You head home.
You try to avoid the stone still stuck in the lining of your boot.
Meanwhile, your mind is a tennis court batting the same old arguments back and fore. It’s not that you disagree. Something should be done. This is not OK. The world is not OK. But you can’t see how to fix things. You’ve seen all the articles, the blogs, the tweets and the Facebook posts and you’re at a loss. You can’t put out the fires and thinking about that for too long makes you want to tear out your hair. You open your mouth to scream. But screaming is just as hopeless. The fire would only feed on the air from your lungs while you suffocate.
And it’s so easy to suffocate in the flames.
You take a deep breath.
You can’t stop the world from burning, but you can stop yourself burning up with it.
So, you go back. Back through the street, back through the fires, back to the shop.
You sign up to the dousing drive. Your old friend is still busy, but they give you a sticker and a smile. You know the sticker will just burn up like all the others.
You put the sticker on your oxygen mask anyway.
Outside the shop you leave the bottle of water underneath the foil sheet, just in case. You say sorry for so quickly judging the man caught outside, for not stopping to ask if he was ok. He’s not here. And even if he was, he probably wouldn’t be able to hear you over the hiss of your respirator and the crackle of the fire.
You say it all out loud anyway.
Back in your flat, you spoon out coffee. You pass water through the external pipes, redirecting the heat and pressure from the world outside to turn this earthy powder into a spell of revival. You pour in warm milk, spooling a swirling caramel galaxy in the centre of the black, bitter liquid. Because you need the milk to soften the stimulant, to turn the punch into an embrace. And you still believe you owe yourself more embraces than punches. You sip and feel the warmth—a good and gentle warmth—spread through your chest. Then you stand at the window and you watch the world burn.
You can’t stop the fires. But you can make an old friend smile. You can leave water for those caught out. You can keep dousing the flames, no matter how many times they come back. And maybe, one day, you’ll even see the fire reduced to a smoulder.
You can go on. You can bear it.
But maybe have your coffee first.
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Contains work from Zoë Wicomb, Dorothy Cornish, Imtiaz Dharker, and Heather Parry, along with a conversation with Kathleen Jamie and Nina Mingya Powles