The Warmth We Had

As I roused myself from a deep slumber of peaceful dreams of fantasy lands and mystical realms, I'm not sure what hit my senses first. It may have been the chatter of the blackbirds, jackdaws and crows that frequented the trees of our garden. Tuneful whistles and calls to their brethren about the succulent worms and scraps they had discovered. It may have been the unruly squeak of a gull or two. Though perhaps it was the sun shining through the partially open blinds of our bedroom, piercing through the glazing to my retinas as I felt its warmth.

More than likely, it was the strong scent ascending through the house from the kitchen, where my wife, Dia, was undoubtedly stood in front of the espresso machine starting our breakfast drinks. A chaser for the shenanigans of the horizontal rumba of last night. Sydney was what it said on her birth certificate, but to me she was my Dia.

If I had to wager on it, I'd say with surety that she was stood in her oversized plaid nightshirt, her lightly tanned calves covered where it mattered, and she was listening to something light, bright and anthemic to get the blood going.

Maybe it was a collage of all these sensorial delights that awaited me each morning of summer.

I thanked the sun for all it gave us and proceeded to clean the bed musk from my mouth before jauntily making my way down the stairs to my wife and that strong, earthy dose of caffeine.

Stealing a kiss from her and drawing her into my embrace, we stood swaying in the kitchen as we each sipped our delicious brews over one another's shoulders.

I close my eyes and hold onto the warmth and her intoxicating scent of coffee, sex and Dia. When I open them again, we're sat down, huddled closer and more permanently. Less romantic and passionate. More desperate, as our survival instincts have taught us to search out the warmest. Still committed, as my mind wanders to summer. That summer.

It was cooler than usual. Which was strange, given the fact our country, never mind our city, was known for extraordinarily warm summers. Tourists flocked year in, year out from colder parts of our blue planet to soak up the rays.

That was perhaps one of the first things we really noticed in the city. Fewer tourists. Many scientists argued that it was just an every-once-in-a-while freak occurrence, while others on the scarier part of the internet thought it was something... different. Ah, the internet. It's funny how that becomes unimportant. Even the thing you'd swear you'd never be able to function without is forgotten when you have graver concerns than catching up on the latest episode of that hit show or finding out what your friends are doing.

Doomscrolling had become a species-level pastime, so that is why so many of us disregarded... well, everything.

Agriculturally speaking, trouble was brewing as farmers and large corporations were quietly whispering behind closed doors about shortages and the move to indoor farming and the use of LED lights to grow crops, as well as lab-born proteins and hybrid abominations designed to survive in colder climes. They were pushed as acceptable and even progressive evolutions.

Our chapped lips coalesced as what was once intoxicating and a passion play in miniature became more akin to the rubbing of sandpaper against a surface you were priming to paint.

We never lost our sense of wonder in one another. Despite the discomfort. This was still the only place I'd be and where she would be. By one another's side.

As the harvests failed. Not dramatically. Gradually. Everything became more scarce and therefore expensive. Bananas and apples jumped in price to that of the most exotic fruits, and milk supplies, beef, lamb and pork suffered too.

The prevailing argument over the background noise of conspiracies was that it was a blip.

"Kiss my neck. Please. I need to feel you," she whispered weakly but still alluringly, though much of her feminine desires and womanly wiles were subjugated by desperation and weakness.

As I brushed her coat down gently, revealing her pale and broken skin, I kissed it gently. Her flaking skin had lost much of her heady taste as I held it weakly between my broken lips.

She gasped, but more in the hope that she might generate some heat.

A snowflake landed on her shoulder that summer, or was it the following summer? It's hard to keep track of the precise timeline. We were dancing at an outdoor party in the park and her loose-front spaghetti-strap top dazzled and pulled me closer at the sight of her flesh. Then she moaned as a crystalline white gem graced her shoulder and retained its pristine, pretty form long enough for us to take a photograph before it melted and we fell to the ground. Consumed with love and lust, it became a funny footnote.

I tasted and shared the moist remains of that freak snowflake as we kissed and then took ourselves home.

A single snowflake in the height of summer is a beautiful "where were you?" moment.

The days seemed to grow shorter, though. Darkness arrived sooner, even when the clocks insisted it shouldn't. They also grew colder, and all the leaves were brown weeks before autumn normally announced itself.

Rationing was always a possibility, but those who could remember the war and the COVID years felt certain we had learned from past mistakes and it'd never happen.

Until it did.

As I worked my chapped lips gently across her shoulder to her neck, I could feel the dehydrated flesh was brittle as my tongue searched for any small morsel of sweat. She murmured as she always had. But the heat, the intensity was gone.

She reached behind me and found a stalk. It looked ashen, almost charcoal-like. A singular apple stalk.

She toyed with it as I rested her head on my shoulder and rubbed her back.

Nature became quieter. Not just as our infrastructure completely changed, though the percussive drumming of machinery helped shield us from the horror of the birds, the dogs, the cats and other animals quietening.

The tuneful din of hummingbirds and nightingales gradually faded, as did the arguments between neighbouring dogs and the buzzing of insects in flight.

As my fingertips rubbed at the back of her neck, I remembered the vinegar I applied between kisses as I treated her wasp sting.

Even the disappearance of wasps ached.

Money, inevitably, became useless and, while free public transport became available, traffic quietly, almost unremarkably, lessened.

The times we had wished for that to happen seemed a distant memory, and the reality was unwelcome.

It was only after a few summers, or what they amounted to, that we noticed the dim, dull light of the world.

I felt her hands grip and fist at my hair. I knew she dreamed we were dreaming. I did too.

We coalesced under the dulling light and thought it romantic.

Until it wasn't.

The temperature drops meant that we had more excuses to spend more time in each other's skin, but by that point even our positive attitudes, notorious as they were among family and friends, were not enough to keep the increasing alarm and uncertainty from holding us captive.

"Temporary climate anomaly" was the phrase they used in broadcasts and literature to explain to us—the people—what was happening.

We had hope.

Until we didn't.

I pulled back from her and offered her a small smile. The cheekiness had disappeared from our eyes, even if we felt it deep down.

As the world quietened and dimmed, scientists and experts, political and social commentators, and anyone with an audience discussed solar luminosity decline.

The governments had been working together on a Solar Restoration and Resilience Project that sounded more Philip K. Dick than Science Weekly. I paid it no mind. Promises by the powerful are cheap until they become expensive and fruitless. I was more concerned about maintaining our reliance on caffeine.

The dry jargon failed to hide the truth. Our once bright city was now a muted monochromatic centre with joy sapped from it one lumen at a time.

"Do... you want me to strip naked... one last time?" I croaked slowly, almost clinically, into her ear.

"You only want my warmth, not to literally dry hump me, mister," she laughed, then cried.

Tearless.

We didn't know the timeline but knew summers were disappearing, and so Dia proposed we skinny-dip in a lake just outside of the city.

A final hurrah. What the hell.

I remember we rode our bikes, taking the most rural route to the lake. There was a poignant stillness.

It was quite chilly, but as Dia slid her yellow shorts down her pillowy thighs and kicked them off before repeating the process with her panties, the sight of her flesh, of the only woman I had ever loved, was all the encouragement I needed.

Besides, her teasing and chicken noises felt like a challenge being dropped before me as quickly as her white tee and matching yellow bra slid from the bottle-tanned curves of her breasts.

She gasped as she stepped first her right, then her left foot into the lake before disappearing beneath the water to baptise the rest of her body.

I didn't mess about discarding my own shorts and tee before I joined her butt naked, pulling her close to share the rising body heat in the cool lake.

"That's the first chicken I've heard in a while, Dia."

A harmless joke that was followed by giggles and the throes of passion.

The day turned to darkness as I started a fire and snuggled her against me while we used a dead tree stump as a backrest.

It was only then, as our eyes wandered from the warm glow and crackle of the fire to the disc in the sky, that I realised there were two.

Dia cried in my arms as the chill caught our skin and the lake water coating our bodies dried to nothing.

There was our sun. The one I remembered. The one that couldn't be stared at for too long, now faded to the dying star it was, floating in the vast oblivion of space.

Then a secondary... sun?

It looked wrong. Clean lines, mechanical, with a hard-to-place offness.

"Do you remember skinny-dipping?" she asked, knowing I never forgot it. Knowing I had mentioned it at any opportunity as a reminder of just how much she loved me. When we argued, when we were distressed, and when we realised the governments and scientists of the world had known far more than they had let on.

A solar flare—one of the last violent acts of our most constant and faithful guardian—had crippled the artificial disc, our last ray of hope, and so it hung beside its fading counterpart, every bit as useless.

It was not long after that the leaders, fearing the wrath of those they led, went into hiding.

I reached for the small heater we had in our once-dreamlike bedroom and felt my thumbnail break as I clicked it on.

We quietly held onto one another and silently bargained with chance as to whether the generator would give out before we did.

As our chapped lips grazed and coalesced and we feebly, but lovingly, tried to bite at one another, the mechanics and engineering of man ceased.

We'd never know, of course.

*

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