Carly Midgley

Lifeline

We walk the burning earth for months before Beth dares to ask me.

She waits months after the neighbourhood burns, fat grey apartment blocks blazing under orange sky. Months after food runs out at the city’s emergency shelter, after I ask if she’ll come with me to search for a surviving town.

She waits long enough that we grow used to the red flames, the constant musk of smoke, each other. It’s almost laughable to look back on what we once were: a pair of lonely thirtysomething neighbours whose taut how are yous glittered with a layer of frost.

There’s no space for anything like frost in this new world. Trust, reliance, grudging respect—these things are forced into us by the constant, hungry encroaching of the flames.

Still, we talk little about things that would have fostered friendship in the world before: hopes, memories, regrets. What exists between us is built on danger, intense but circumstantial need. Nothing more.

Each place we pass through feels charged with impermanence, grief waiting to burst free. The charcoal-outline remains of thick forests, the rare green flash of still-living trees, lodge in my heart with equal depth. The dead and the soon to be dead, with nothing but time to delineate them. Even the shells of ugly towns, places I would never have visited in the world before, make me ache. They’re someone’s landscape, someone’s jumble of friends’ houses and favourite restaurants and childhood schoolyards, all slated to melt and warp and crumble.

It’s above a town like this—wartime houses and peeling paint and a child’s bike abandoned by the road we follow out—that Beth breaks our rhythm.

We’ve picked our way up a rocky hill that rises behind the town like a fat thumb. At its top, we huddle against a boulder, eyes on the horizon. The closest of the fires is a bright line to the west, still far enough to look almost pretty.

Cross-legged on the ground to my left, she keeps sneaking looks at me. Even by night, it’s hot, a constant thrumming reminder of what waits tomorrow and every day after: keep running, find water, stay alive. No space for any uncertainty.

So the next time I catch her looking, I growl, “What?”

“Your old business,” she says. “The fortune telling. Did you really believe in it?”

I almost laugh. The world burns, set ablaze by a crisis we had every chance to predict. We’ve picked our way through it for months, become one another’s sole protectors, and she’s never asked me a question more complex than Where to next?

But now, suddenly, she wants to know if I used to be a con artist.

It makes sense, I suppose. Beth never really hid how she felt about my work. Lost souls was the phrase she used for the clients who came to me, always accusatory.

But others in the building whispered about her too, trading phrases like married young and messy divorce and so much quieter now, thank god.

“She’s just sensitive,” a woman stage-whispered to me in the laundry room once. “Thinks you’re taking advantage of sad people like her.”

It used to make me so angry—her suspicion, their gossip.

It feels far away now.

“Yes,” I tell her flatly. “I did.”

She nods. Her blonde braid swings with the motion.

Then she stretches both hands out to me, palms up.

“Will I ever find love?” she asks.

My heart skitters. My eyes meet hers hard, searching for the joke, the return to our safe distance.

But her smile wavers. A raw softness shimmers in her eyes.

She wants a real answer.

Maybe I should be flattered she’s come to trust me, but something hot and ugly and bilious surges up from my stomach. I want to shove her, scream at her, for making me think at all of what’s been lost. I’ve learned to swallow the ache of the dying world like so much fine-ground glass. I don’t want to be reminded of what once seemed important: careers, romance, families. She’s asking a small question, a selfish one that won’t help us survive.

“I don’t do that anymore,” I snap.

“Why not?”

Because it makes me hurt. Because there’s no future left to tell. Because none of it matters, the shape of your hands or your heart or your happiness, in a wasteland.

“Why do you want to know?” I bite out.

She flushes.

“It’s stupid,” she says. “But I still miss him.”

It’s the closest thing to a confession she’s ever offered me. I don’t want to care; I have no softness left in my soul for her hurt or her hunger.

But she shoves her hands into my own, and I don’t have the energy to fight her.

We fall quiet. We’ve touched plenty on this journey, but it’s always been utilitarian: hauling each other up slopes, exchanging a battered thermos of water. This is different. Intimate. With visceral intensity, I remember reading strangers’ palms: how connection hummed between our hands, an almost holy moment of trust.

I suck in a breath, struggle to focus. I try to follow her life line.

Her hands are a mirror of what mine have become—what every survivor’s must be. The familiar lines stutter over white ropes of scar tissue and shiny, sore burns. Like a radio choking on static, the wounds warp and muffle the story the lines should tell. These hands are no different from the dead forest behind us or the ruins of our city: an unsalvageable shell, its meaning devoured by insatiable, uncaring heat. Something in all of us has been gutted, and what we might have been is far beyond reach.

I don’t realize I’m crying until Beth curls her fingers around mine.

The act is pointless. Tiny. Kind.

It melts what few defenses I have left. The image of her ruined fingers fractures behind a veil of tears. The loss quakes out of me in heaving sobs.

We cling to one another’s hands.

“Gone,” I whisper, choking through the tears.

“I know,” she says, gentle. “It’s fucked.”

When I finally surface, something in me has emptied. Stilled.

I don’t know what I’m looking for, only that I’m hungry for a thousand forgotten things, as I peel back her fingers to bare her palms.

“It’s stupid,” she repeats, flushing again. “You don’t have to.”

But she doesn’t pull away.

I brush my fingers over the scar that webs across her head and heart lines: a white burn mark left by her apartment’s metal doorknob. It’s a fingerprint of the old world, a record of her final attempt to return home.

Below it, a healing burn glistens, stretching her fate line in a scarlet swell of skin. The fate line reflects enormity—external forces too big to control. The burn is from a smoldering branch she blocked before it could reach me.

“The lines tell me about you,” I say, “not really your future.”

She just nods. I don’t know how much of her believes me or even cares; even before, many clients didn’t care for explanations of my methods. They were desperate—for answers, certainly, but also for kindness. Unnecessary touches. Reassuring words.

So I don’t tell Beth what sparks inside me as I study her hands. Her injuries are stories I am only now, in this moment, learning to read. They show me what she’s been willing to suffer for, fight for, and that is so much more telling than the lines she was born with, innocent and easy.

I see self-sacrifice in her palms, loss carried quietly and constantly, an impractical and undefeated will to survive. I see myself. I see ugliness there, yes—loss and pain and hard choices—but none of it without meaning.

I don’t know the answer to her question. Nothing is as certain as it once seemed; every choice I make, from what I say in this moment to where we run in search of water, is a blind and baseless leap of faith.

Maybe she knows this. But she’s trusted me to try to shape her future anyway—and that in its own right, I think, is love.

“Yes,” I tell Beth. “There’s love in your future.”

The lines on her face shift into a smile.

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Carly Midgley: “I am a Toronto-based writer and freelance editor whose first love is speculative fiction (especially fairy tale retellings with an emotional heart). My best writing comes from places of deep personal emotion, and this piece was ignited by the fear of knowing I and my loved ones will have to live through the ongoing climate crisis. Faced with such a massive danger, hope and love sometimes seem beside the point, but I believe they’re deeply necessary to build a world worth living in—even if we’re already too late to avert the catastrophe.”