No Summer - Day 3 of 31 Stories (January 2022)

While I started with the idea from The Writing Network's prompt for today ("Write a story about a year without a summer,") I ended up taking it in a different direction - is there ever really a summer if summer never ends? Behold, draft zero of No Summer.

 Everything was dry as dust, and the heat was becoming unbearable. That's what people were saying on television, at least, but we had been through "unbearable" heat for the better part of a year now, and most of us had managed to bear it. We didn't like it, exactly, and there had been a few of us who hadn't managed to bear it, but most of us managed to make it from one day to the next.

Scientists still weren't sure what happened, exactly. The seasons just...stopped. The spring had been hotter than most of the ones we'd had before, but nothing out of the ordinary. The summer had been dry, the sun blasting down and making the ground rock-hard and keeping anything from growing. We knew that the fall would kill off anything that the summer hadn't already destroyed, but at least the temperatures would cool off.

Except...the temperatures never cooled off. The end of the year, and winter should have arrived, but it never did. No snow, no cold air to blow in and take the edge off the unrelenting heat. The trees remained bare, even when spring should have arrived and things should have started budding and blooming. Everything that should have been growing simply didn't, unless it was in a greenhouse of some sort. The ground remained baked dry and dusty, with no hint of shade or rain to allow things to grow again.

By the time I graduated from high school, I didn't remember much of a world without an endless wave of heat. The names of the seasons didn't mean much to me, even though I had some vague memories of snow and jumping in piles of fallen leaves. My youngest brother, only three years old, didn't understand when people referred to "spring" or "summer," because the heat was all he'd ever known.

Every now and again, the scientists would come up with a new plan, a new study that would lead them to believe that the seasons would come back. They thought they could seed the clouds, bring on the rain, and kick-start a water cycle again. Unfortunately, the clouds were too thin and far away, and so the missiles with the chemicals used to seed the clouds ended up falling back to the earth with no impact on the sky at all. We all saw them go up, hope in our throats, and felt the pain of that hope burn down when the missiles came crashing back down.

It wasn't like this everywhere in the world, I'd heard. There were parts of other countries, other continents, that still had a season or two. They weren't the same four seasons that the old books talked about - usually, there was a growing season, and a harvesting season, with perhaps a time of cold and ice in between. Still, those places seemed so far away, especially when some of us had never had the means to do any kind of real traveling, and we knew it was unlikely that we'd ever experience these seasons for ourselves. For some of us, the greenhouses and hydroponic farms were the only things that would give us the chance to earn a livelihood, and they were what kept the people of our homes fed. There was nothing for it but to keep working and hoping that the next year might be a little better, knowing full well that it likely wouldn't be.

Still, in my heart of hearts, I wanted to go away from home. It felt awful to even think it, but I wanted to learn about more than just the greenhouses and farms. I knew that the ways we were doing things weren't the best ways out there - I'd seen things online about different, more efficient methods that people in other areas that were similarly set up like us were using, and they were able to have higher yields with less water usage. I showed them to my parents, but they weren't the ones who had the say-so about the 'houses and farms - we all just worked in them, but we didn't own them or have any kind of management in them. The people who did have the power wouldn't listen to some kid who was coming to them with ideas they'd seen online. I knew because those were the exact words they used when I tried to show them what other states were doing, and how they were able to increase their yield. I wasn't an authority in any way, and so they had no obligation to listen to me. I didn't even know what it took to run a 'house or a farm, so why would I be able to tell them anything about how to run theirs better?

It set a fire in me that I had to keep banked down, for the sake of my own sanity. I wasn't an authority, it was true, but I had the chance to go out and learn enough to make myself an authority - make myself someone they would have to listen to. There were schools that were offering degree programs specifically in hydroponic farming and greenhouse growth, finding the best ways to increase yields with less water, because it was a big issue. If I'd been able to go to one of those schools, get one of those degrees, spend some time in the other states that had spent more money and time in figuring out a better way to deal with a lack of seasons instead of just hodge-podging it all together the way we had, I would stand a chance of getting someone to listen to me when I came back home. I could bring that information back, and make things better for everyone at home.

It was a pipe dream, though, because we'd never be able to afford to send me to school. Not only was travel and school expensive, my family couldn't do without my income from working in the 'house. Besides, just because I wanted to do it didn't mean that I was the right person to do it. There were plenty of people who were smarter than I was, who would do much better if they were sent off to school to make things better. Hell, my best friend's sister was saving up money to go be an actress on the coast, because she hated working in the 'house and the farm with the rest of us, and she'd had a plan in place to do that since she was twelve. She wasn't planning to come back until she'd made as much money as she could, and then she was going to move all of her family away from here and buy them a big house out on the coast, where they could see her in the movies and spend their days lounging around and dancing in the rain. It wasn't my kind of dream, but I could admire the intensity of it for her.

I came home from my shift at the 'house after graduation - the ceremony had been a small affair, since most of our schooling was done remotely and online to avoid having to plumb and cool another big building in the community. We had the ceremony early in the morning, before the heat really turned up, and so we could go on to work our full shifts for the day; there was no point in wasting a day just because we finished school. I'd heard from my grandparents once that they wished we'd been able to have a big party for graduation, but that always seemed kind of foolish to me - why celebrate something where you've just finished the bare minimum, and it's not actually going to change anything in your day to day life? Well, that's not entirely true - now that I didn't have school to worry about, the law said that I could work a normal 50 hour week, instead of restricting it to 35 hours to provide sufficient time for classroom instruction. I was looking forward to that, at least.

I came into my bedroom and set my jacket on the back of my chair, with my mask tossed into the laundry basket next to the door. The jacket was more for protection against the dust that permeated everything, and the masks had to be washed every three days to keep the dust from clogging up the cloth and rendering them useless. I started to take off my boots, before I noticed that there was something on my bed, on top of my pillow. I could just make out the edges of it with the light from the moon outside, but it wasn't enough to see exactly what it was. I turned on my bedside lamp, squinting to try to keep from blinding myself, and gave myself a moment to adjust before picking up the object.

It was a large envelope with my name and address on it, with a return address from the state college at the capitol. I frowned, wondering what they wanted, because I'd never written to a college before. Still, my heart started pounding a little louder as I pulled the envelope open and slid out a large stack of paper. On top of the stack was a small pile of shiny cardboard cut-outs - confetti? Why was a college sending me confetti?

I shook the things back into the envelope as best as I could and then looked at the top page of the stack. My heart, which had been pounding so loudly only seconds before, felt like it stopped. I had been accepted to the college, and my tuition was being paid for by a scholarship specifically for people from my town. Apparently, someone had heard what I had done by talking to the owners of the 'houses and farms, and they decided- they wanted- they-

There was a small, handwritten note at the bottom of the front page. "Become an expert. Come back and change their minds. I believe you can do it." No name, no initials, no nothing. Just a mission statement, and a belief in me that I didn't have in myself.

It was everything I needed to change the world.