Long Summer with Man on Stilts by Stacey C. Johnson
Luz woke before the light changed, before the blinds picked up their faint blue, and knew without touching him that Eli had already pulled himself upright into the day. She could feel the shift from sleep to intention, a tightening of the air near his side of the bed. His exhale turned sharp, almost preparatory, the way a diver inhales before breaking a surface. Mornings in fire season were like that. Except the season lasted longer each year, until eventually it was simply the season, everything else the interruption.
She lay there a moment, eyes closed, letting the soft pressure of his readiness find its way through the dark. It was never readiness for her, or for the child. It was readiness for the thing he hadn’t yet encountered but believed would come. A call, a rupture, a disaster with his name on it. Some mornings she imagined she could hear the faint sound of boxes shifting, though she knew it was only her mind rearranging fear into sound.
When she came into the kitchen, he was already standing before the hall closet with the door open, scanning the stacked boxes he’d arranged in militant rows. His shoulders were tense. His hands were poised as though waiting for direction from something only he could hear.
He had labeled each box with a black Sharpie on index cards taped neatly to the front: Insect, Rain, Fire, Fuel, Cuts, Shelter, Water, Tools. The handwriting was rigid, angular, a script that seemed carved rather than written. He had memorized where each item lived, though the inventory changed every week.
She leaned against the counter, watching him without comment. There were mornings when he’d remove every box, place them in a different configuration, re-tape the labels, and slide them back with the reverence of someone performing a burial rite. Other mornings he’d only adjust one card by a fraction of an inch. This morning, he was shifting weight from foot to foot, a hum caught low in his throat. The wind outside hadn’t picked up yet, but she could feel it coming.
“I think I should reorganize the fuel stores,” he said, though she hadn’t asked. His voice carried the tremble of a man waiting for confirmation from a world that never answered.
She murmured something neutral. Anything she said could be a match. Over the years she’d learned how sentences should be lit or smothered, when silence was safer than agreement.
The closet that should have held linens was now his arsenal, his proof that danger was real and could be prepared for. Propane cylinders stacked like small soldiers. Portable stoves arranged in size order. Boxes of ammunition in various calibers. MREs. Freeze-dried stews. A surgical kit. Paracord. A water filtration system. A box trap. Foldable shovels. Knives in their sheaths—one for the chest, one strapped to the thigh, one that clipped to the belt like a tail.
“You laugh now,” he sometimes told her, back still turned.
She never laughed.
He closed the closet. “Winds are changing.”
She nodded. They were always changing.
He turned to the table, where he had laid out maps he no longer trusted. Thin red lines traced paths from their neighborhood to imagined safe zones: mesas, empty fields, the riverbed that had dried to gravel. He’d told her once that the riverbed was the safest place in a fire, which had struck her as ironic—safety in a place that held no water, no shade, only the scorched memory of flow.
“You should get ready too,” he said, folding a map with quick, decisive hands.
She looked at him. She wanted to say she had been ready her entire life, ready in ways he could not understand—ready for a man’s unraveling, for a child’s watching, for the slow unspooling of a life that had once seemed solid. Ready for heat. Ready for leaving. Ready, most of all, for staying when she wasn’t sure she should.
Instead, she said, “Tell me what you need.” Love had become a form of triage.
The television was on before she finished her coffee. Night-vision war footage flickered across the screen—explosions glowing like radioactive flowers. Soldiers moved like green ghosts. Eli sat on the edge of the couch, dismantling his .22 on a towel as though tending to a delicate ritual. He never fired it. The point was not use. It was readiness.
Luz would sometimes come in late at night and see him like this—the war blooming on the screen, the gun pieces lined in order, the bluing agent gleaming like dark honey in its jar. She never asked whether he was finished or just about to begin.
That summer, the news announced new men missing almost every day. Men from deployments, men from towns with names Luz had never heard, men whose families said they felt the moment something went wrong. She saw the way Eli’s eyes tightened when these reports aired, as though he recognized each missing name by instinct.
“I should have enlisted,” he said, after the layoffs at the plant. He did not enlist.
Luz would come out of the bedroom at midnight, her throat dry, and find him unchanged since she’d gone to sleep: the same posture, the same empty cans, the same wet face.
“I need to do something,” he rasped. His voice cracked. She wasn’t sure whether he was talking to her, or the men on the screen, or the fire season itself.
She placed a hand between his shoulder blades—a gesture she used less and less, the heat of him sometimes rising so sharply it felt like touching a stove. He whispered something about a man who goes missing. She could not make out the rest.
Hours later, the war footage dissolved into infomercials. The Slap Chop man appeared, face too bright, gestures too quick, shouting, You’re gonna love my nuts! The absurdity would have made Luz laugh in another life. But now it only made the room feel unhinged, as if the world had decided to give them no stable ground on which to rest.
Eli remained alert even as exhaustion dragged at him. His eyes stayed fixed on the screen long after the footage changed. He seemed to be waiting for another world to rise out of the fluorescent glow, something that would call him by his hidden name, the one he believed he had been trained for.
Luz learned not to disturb him in this state. Rage without direction would find an object, and she did not want to be that object. She waited him out. Some nights he’d fall asleep sitting upright, head tilted in a way that could only mean complaints about neck soreness when he woke. Other nights he stayed awake until dawn, checking the news every few minutes as though expecting proof that danger had finally arrived.
It was during one of these late-night vigils that he turned to her and said, “Us against the world,” with a conviction so fierce it made her shiver.
She wanted to ask which version of the world he meant—the one burning outside or the one burning inside him. But she only nodded. Because the house was quiet, and the child was sleeping, and she feared what would happen if she said anything else.
When Babygirl was still in diapers, Luz used to take her out to the porch in the afternoons. This was before the boxes multiplied, before the quiet in the apartment thickened into something that tasted like metal. The porch was their small sanctuary. Babygirl would pull herself up on the wrought-iron table and slap her hands against the corrugated glass in greeting, as though the world answered her in its own language.
Luz held her coffee cup with both hands, grounding herself in the warmth. She tried to remember a line from Robinson Jeffers about beauty stretching like a web in the air. The line never came. But the air around Babygirl shimmered with its own meaning.
“Sheem! Ahimanga! Flangamash!” the child declared to the breeze.
There were pots of jasmine, basil, rosemary. Two pots held only soil, so Babygirl could transfer earth from one to the other, her brow furrowed in concentration. Sometimes a seedling took root. Sometimes it drowned. Sometimes it vanished, carried off by wind or unseen hands. Luz knew better than to intervene. The point was the movement. The taking-and-giving, the rearranging of worlds.
“Bee-mow,” Babygirl murmured, digging in the soil. “Faranges!”
Luz closed her eyes, letting the inventiveness of the child’s tongue soften the sharpness of her own mind. Babygirl’s words sounded like spells, like warnings, like promises not yet decipherable.
It was on one of those afternoons that the wind changed. It carried the faint metallic scent of heat rising from distant canyons. The air tasted like something had gone wrong far away and was deciding whether to come closer.
People in checkout lines began saying, “Fire season’s gonna be bad this year,” in the same tone people used for births or deaths—as though it were something natural, cyclical, inevitable. Luz nodded each time, the words sliding into her like small stones.
That night the sky turned a color she didn’t have a name for—something between bruise and sunrise. Ash settled on the windshield of their car, thin as frost.
Eli stood outside, watching the sky. “We need to be ready to evacuate,” he said, not turning toward her.
The weatherman came on. “Kyle Shambone,” the screen said under his face. Eli snorted.
“Kyle Shambone is an idiot,” he announced to the room. The mispronunciation of some city set him off. Then a misaligned graphic. Then a stumble over the word precipitation.
“Look at him,” Eli barked. “He’s not even pointing at Florida. Look—LOOK. If I’m living in D.C., should I be boarding up my windows?! Should I, Kyle?!” His voice rose. Luz stayed very still.
But when the camera cut to a story about evacuation routes, he went silent, eyes narrowing, the way he did when he believed an event might finally align with the disaster he’d been preparing for.
The fires spread from the Mexican border to Santa Barbara. Horses fled the hills. Coyotes and bobcats skidded across freeways. The air filled with particles that made the sun look like a bloodshot eye.
Evacuation orders spread across the county. A stranger at a rest stop said it looked like heaven had a black eye. Luz couldn’t shake the phrase. Something about it felt truer than anything the news offered.
When the evacuation order reached their area, they were already on their second night at the Super 8. Eli had loaded the truck before the call came. He’d covered the smoke alarm in duct tape so they could cook ramen on a portable stove. Babygirl slept between them, her small body rising and falling like a tide.
Luz remembered the first time Eli had built a fire when they were young, before marriage, before the boxes. It had taken him longer than he expected, and she’d told him not to worry about it, they’d be fine without it. But he’d looked at her with something fierce and wounded in his eyes. “You have to trust me,” he said. That memory hovered in the motel room like a scent.
They returned home the same day the evacuation order lifted.
The boxes stayed by the door for a week. Eli sat on the edge of the couch, elbows on knees, waiting for something. Luz didn’t know what. A new call. A sign. Some rupture. She watched him watching the window as if the sky were a screen he expected news to erupt from.
Meanwhile, she found herself stumbling into strange corners of the internet. One night she watched a video titled, “Watch this Tuscaloosa woman dress out six possums in a minute!” The woman’s movements were fluid, sure, gleaming. Luz couldn’t look away. Something about the woman’s speed and certainty lodged in her like a seed. Six possums in a minute, she repeated under her breath, the line becoming its own strange litany.
It was around then that Eli began insisting they draft recipes for a world where grocery stores might close.
“For what?” she asked.
“For things we don’t normally eat,” he said. His eyes had the flat gleam of someone who’d survived too much or not enough, “—that we might have to.”
She printed recipes: squirrel fricassee, rat-atouille, possum primavera. A recipe for Bordeaux rat recommended marinating the rodent in old wine to mimic the taste of French cellar-dwellers.
All of this unfolded under the blue glow of another Sham-Wow demonstration. Eli cried silently over a can of something indistinguishable while the infomercial host shouted, You’ll be saying ‘WOW!’ every time!
The absurdity and the grief twined like two vines choking the same trellis.
Most nights, Babygirl slept through the sirens and alerts. Luz kept a hand on her chest, feeling the small rise and fall. The child’s breath anchored her. Eli’s breath unsettled her. The wind rattled the vents. The fires moved closer, then changed direction, then returned, like a creature unsure where to strike.
Then one evening the fires slowed. The news said 70% contained. Eli didn’t believe it.
He went out to the porch and stared at the sky between two buildings. Luz saw the ash settle into his hair like premature gray. His feet were wet from where Babygirl had watered the plants earlier. He stood a long time, waiting for the sky to speak.
A week later, he found the stilts.
They were in the storage unit behind a box labeled Seasonal—a misleading term, given that their seasons had ceased to behave.
Luz was in the laundry room, so she did not see his face registering his decision. It must have been a look that hovered between mischief and desperation. Something wounded and childlike, suggesting faith in flight and heights to rescue whatever horizon he had lost.
He strapped himself in, buckles clinking like small bones. He stood unsteadily in the narrow patch of grass beside the storage unit.
“Hah, hah, hah!” he howled, rising above them. Babygirl scream-laughed, delighted by the sudden transformation of her father into a teetering giant. For one suspended second, he looked almost airborne—a man practicing the lift-off he prayed catastrophe would one day grant.
Then he came down. A heavy thud.
The air around them stilled. The silence felt structural, as if a supporting beam had cracked.
Luz reached for Babygirl’s hand. Something in the long summer had ended. Something else had begun.
Outside, the wind quieted for the first time in weeks. The air tasted different, as though the season had turned, but the world hadn’t yet decided what into. Something in her already had.
