“Wildland” by Emily Sinclair (fiction, ’14)

A story by Emily Sinclair (fiction, ’14) appears in Cheat River Review:

Wildland

It was the second week in September, and bright yellow mums in buckets sat outside the Safeway, in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. On impulse, I grabbed a bucket, imagining the flowers on my front porch, a spot of color against the gray hazy air from wildfires twelve miles to the north. As I pushed my cart through the store, two women stopped me to say how beautiful they were, how they wanted them, too. For dinner, I bought colors: red peppers, green acorn squash, yellow carrots.

The fire had started three days before; by the second day, it had grown, uncontained, to more than two thousand acres; by day four, nearly four thousand.

… continue reading here.