“Help me set up the ay-see before we both die” said Eva. She said it like that, like A.C. was a real word and not an abbreviation. She fanned her upturned face with an ice pack because she was convinced this made the air cooler. She said that’s what the “ay-see” did anyway. She was wearing only a swimsuit and sunglasses and her skin was sunny colored. My hair was still wet from the shower and already I had begun to sweat. It was one of those too hot summer days that make people do crazy things.

The air conditioner was in the place bellow the upstairs porch that on any other day would be damp and cool. The sun was high in the sky and had burned the grass and the skin bellow my eyes. We lifted the brown box that was the air conditioner and moved like a beetle up the stairs. My hands were wet and I clasped so hard lines from the vent became embedded in my hands.

Once in Eva’s room, the thing didn’t much fancy being placed in the window. It was too tall and not wide enough. Eva looked at me sort of helplessly but I could only shrug. All my AC knowledge came from The Brave Little Toaster. Finally she decided to push it in at an upward angle. There were also screens on the sides of it to hold it in the window. If this had been a scene from the Brave Little Toaster those screens would have been neck fat, I suppose. Even with all the neck fat the AC was not wide enough for the window so we used liberal amounts of duct tape to hold it in its place. Then we stood back, dripping in sweat, to admire our work and watch it sputter into life. I half expected it to go ballistic like the one in Brave Little Toaster and start yelling, the odd noises it was making sounded decidedly angry. Instead, a second later, we realized the air coming out of it was hotter than the air in the room. Eva banged her fist on it in frustration and grabbed it quickly as the duct tape broke to keep it from falling out the window.

“I suppose we’ll have to do it the old fashioned way,” said Eva, throwing open the windows and turning on the fan.

“How barbaric. This must be how cave men cooled down their caves,” said I, laughing at my own words. “You know, when cave men had global warming induced heat waves.”

“I suppose when the ice age ended it was probably sort of like this,” agreed Eva. “The cave men were probably worried about the ozone layer and all.”

“Nah, the ice age was awful, people were probably happy,” said I. “This sucks because the world was finally the perfect temperature and now we had to ruin it.” It was the sort of day where nothing you said was very smart anyway, so you might as well not even try.

We lay out in the living room, where the fan was blowing warm air from outside that was, at least, moving. My limbs felt like blocks of wood, heavy and useless and I could feel sweat draining off me and onto the carpet. Eva put on Sex and the City, season three, as season I had only seen once before. We lay their, our minds and bodies melting from heat and bad TV.

“I wish we were in the Bahamas,” said Eva, as Sarah Jessica Parker drove past a palm tree in the convertible she had insisted on renting on her trip to California, despite the fact that she couldn’t drive standard. “I wish had majitos.”

“Mojitos?” I said.

“They’re great, they’re like rum and sprite and mint. If we were in the Bahamas we could get them for like a dollar.”

“This needs to stop,” I said. “We need to get out of here, I feel like a dog in a car.” I swear there were waves of heat dancing in her kitchen.

“Call someone,” she said. I lumbered to the phone.

“Who?” I never knew who to call. Luckily Eva was more resourceful than me. She called Jay, our friend who owned a car, because he was rarely doing anything ever and his house had air conditioning.

“Come get us before we die,” she said to the phone. “Please.” I could hear the phone laughing but it was less funny to me because she’d already said that once today and because death didn’t seem as funny now, more like a looming possibility if it got a few degrees hotter.

Some time later, wheels screeched into Eva’s driveway and we headed outside. The heat seemed to hit us like a wave, suddenly just walking to the car, with it’s melted pleather seats, seemed a challenge. We seemed to move like zombies. Jay’s friend Alex was sitting shotgun and looking very pink. Jay’s glasses were sliding down his nose. I watched Eva’s boxy brown house as we backed out of her driveway. It was typical suburban house in many ways but to me, it seemed to be smiling because of its doorstep. It reminded me of that happy little red house from a book I read as a child. The little red house was very happy and smiled at everyone and children played around it. Except then a city was built around it and it fell into disrepair. Then one of the decedents of the original owner came back and moved it to the country and it continued to smile. My house smiled at now one. It seemed to glare out under the thick eyebrows of the porch and its roof was hunchbacked.

Alex turned up the car radio and threw an empty McDonalds cup at me.

“Roll down your window,” he said. This did little to help. The sky had turned a sickly shade of orange above the cornfields. The air and the whole world hung still. The only thing moving, in fact, seemed to be the car. It was like being on Mars in a space rover.

I suggested that idea aloud and was harshly reminded by Jay that Mars is very cold. Mercury, being dry and hot, would be more accurate. Venus was too stormy. Mars was red though, like the sky here.

We drove on, in silence, me in defeated silence. It was almost too hot for speaking. We drew near down and Alex lay back in his seat.

“What if this just never stops”” he said. “What if it just keeps getting hotter for the rest of our lives?”

No one said anything, but I knew we were all envisioning this. Sitting here now, in the winter, such an idea seems vague and impossible, but at that time I felt cold dread despite the heat. The hairs on the back of my neck tingled and stood up. It seemed possible and terrifying. The heat was so thick I could barely remember anything else had ever existed.

“It wouldn’t,” said Jay sharply. “Not yet.”

“This is our future though,” said Eva. “It could be.”

The telephone polls stood out more than usual against the oddness of the sky, which was either growing brown or full of dusts. It reminded me of something I’d seen in movies, the ominous cloud of locusts.

We reached the center of town where it was almost pleasant being deserted, save a few stragglers. It was a welcome relief from the usual swarms of students and tourists, choking the streets. The open car windows created a breeze that made the sweat on our backs and shoulders feel cooler.

We left town by way of a rocky road that was really more accurately described as a path. It went past a lush green pond with green vines hanging above it and silhouetted on the surface of the water. Today it felt stagnant and seemed to have sunk, exposing a foot or so of cracked mud on its banks. A little ways further a river ran. Everything was very quiet save the running sound of water.

Further up, the silence was cracked by young laughter. Two boys were wallowing in the shallows of the swimming hole.

“Oy,” they called to us. “It’s Alex and Jay, who’s with you? Eva and Anne? Come see our game.”

Jay and Alex stripped into their boxers and I to my bathing suit. Eva still had no other clothes on. The water was brown and dancing with rings sunlight filtering through the orange sky. It was blissfully cold and made my body ache. The two boys, John being the longhaired, dimpled one and Sam being the blonde, had invented a game that was very easy to follow. The steps included finding big rocks in the muddy bottom of the river and throwing them at each other. As Sam put it, it was easy to learn but hard to master. I proved to be awful at it but it was nice just to swim underwater looking for rocks and feel the water and mud between my toes. When we were done, we all loped out of the water feeling soggy. We piled into the car and took off under the darkening sky.

“Where are we going?” said Sam. We were already dry from the heat.

“Jay’s,” said Alex. “It’s air-conditioned there and they have Popsicles too.”

Jay's house reminded me of a rosy cheeked old man, like Santa Claus perhaps. The sort of house you'd like to sit on and whisper your wishes to.

By the time we got there, the weather had changed yet again. More clouds had rolled in and the sky was the brownish black color of an old bruise. The trees were waving in some imaginary breeze only they could feel, perhaps they were trying to escape.

“I told you the world's ending,” said Eva.

She was right. As we got out of the car, the sky finally cracked open and violent curtains of rain began to fall onto the steaming ground.

“Shit,” said Alex, covering his head with his hands. I didn't try and stop myself getting wet. It was warm rain and I, like the trees, had been waiting for it. The dome of the atmosphere above us was filled with dark lines. The world looked like Venus now, hot and stormy.

We leaned against the car for a while and enjoyed the new, wet world. Then blinking, we went inside, dripping water on Jay's couch while eating Popsicles and listening to raindrops hitting the roof and windows.