The Fall of the House of Fahrenheit

Author's Note

I wrote this story as a lighthearted tribute to Edgar Allan Poe, borrowing his dark, dramatic tone and nineteenth-century storytelling style for a tale that's far less haunted by ghosts than by a relentless summer heat wave. While the voice may feel akin to, the story itself is entirely original and meant as a bit of Gothic fun.

I record this account while my composure sticks to me by a margin so thin it could vanish with one sneeze, for the heat this summer has proven itself a tormentor more merciless than any specter ever conjured at midnight. By the second week of July, our dwelling had become a furnace built expressly for punishing the wicked, and I, a man who once considered himself among the more temperate of gentlemen, had become a creature entirely governed by the small brass instrument nailed above my mantel, an object I once regarded with mild curiosity and now regarded the way a condemned man regards his executioner's axe, sharpening itself somewhere offstage.

My beloved Annabel suggested, gently, that I remove my coat. I refused, on principle, and delivered a small speech about how a gentleman never surrenders his coat merely because the mercury has climbed past ninety degrees, since such surrender marks the first crumbling step toward barbarism, toward men lounging about in undershirts while civilization itself unravels at the seams. She looked at me the way one looks at a fool already sinking in quicksand, said nothing, and returned to her needlework with the calm of someone who knows exactly how this story ends.

By noon the following day I had abandoned coat, waistcoat, and collar, hurling each across the room with the theatrical flair of a tragic actor overplaying his death scene. The brass instrument climbed, ninety-one, ninety-three, ninety-six, and with each degree my dignity dropped an equal amount, as though the two of us had entered some grim wrestling match neither could win, though only one of us was sweating through his second shirt of the morning.

Desperate for ice, I resolved to intercept the iceman myself. He failed to appear three mornings running, and by the third I had taken to loitering at the front of the house, scanning the lane like a lighthouse keeper awaiting a shipwreck. When a cart finally rattled into view, I sprinted toward it, waving both arms, hollering with a desperation entirely unbecoming of a grown man, only to discover the cart belonged to a peddler of brooms. Sensing an opportunity in my madness, he sold me seven. I did not require seven brooms. I required cold, possessed none, and the seven brooms stood afterward in my hallway like a silent regiment assembled purely to mock me every time I passed.

That afternoon I composed a letter to the town physician describing symptoms of my own invention: a burning behind the eyes, a general derangement of temper, a sudden urge to fling myself flat upon the cellar boards and remain there indefinitely, demanding some remedy grander than common sense. His reply, delivered a week later by a boy who could barely suppress a grin, recommended lemonade and a nap. I found this counsel so insulting in its simplicity that I very nearly composed a second letter, several pages longer, arguing my suffering deserved a more dramatic diagnosis. Annabel confiscated the pen before I could finish the first sentence.

That evening, struck by what I believed to be genius, I resolved to submerge myself entirely, boots included, into the small pond behind our property. Alas, the pond had shrunk beneath the same merciless sun tormenting me, reduced to a puddle scarcely deep enough to trouble a duck. When I lowered myself into it with great pleasure, dignity intact, or so I imagined, I succeeded only in coating my legs in mud the color of old tea, while three small boys from the neighboring farm watched the entire performance with the rapt attention usually reserved for a traveling circus.

Annabel, upon seeing me squelch back into the house, laughed so hard she required a cloth for her eyes. I stood dripping in the hallway, a man reduced to mud and misery and declared with what remained of my dignity that I would find a solution to this heat if it cost my very last breath. This declaration would have sounded far more impressive had I not, at that exact moment, slipped on the mud I'd tracked in and landed squarely on one of my seven new brooms.

The following scheme involved a device sold to me by a traveling merchant as a miraculous mechanical cooling apparatus, a contraption of gears and cranked paddles that, once assembled upon the dining table, produced tremendous noise and zero discernible coolness. I cranked until my arm ached, sweat soaking clean through my shirt, and the apparatus merely groaned and spat a puff of dust across my tea like fine gray powder. I demanded my money returned. The merchant had already left the county, presumably laughing the entire way to the next town.

By the fifth day my temper had grown shorter than my patience for the brass instrument above the mantel, which continued its wicked climb toward one hundred degrees. I began speaking to it directly, accusing it aloud of conspiring with the sun against my comfort. Annabel, overhearing this one-sided argument from the next room, suggested, with admirable restraint, that perhaps I required rest rather than revenge against household furniture.

Rest eluded me entirely. Instead, convinced that heat, being a substance that rises, must thin somewhere above the second story, I climbed to the highest point of the house in search of a pocket of coolness reserved for men desperate enough to seek it. I found an attic hotter than any pit ever thundered about from any pulpit, and I fled within minutes, shirt soaked through, dignity soaked through alongside it, cobwebs sticking to my hair like some tragic wig.

I then fashioned myself a cooling garment from an old bedsheet, cutting holes for my arms and declaring the result a triumph of practical invention. Annabel took one look at me standing in the parlor draped in linen, resembling a specter escaped from some forgotten burial ground who had wandered into the wrong century, and informed me plainly that no visitor must ever see me this way. I agreed, removed the sheet, and caught my own reflection in the glass, understanding with a horror greater than any the heat had produced how far I had truly fallen. A grown man. Seven brooms. A bedsheet costume. My ancestors were surely weeping somewhere.

By nightfall, having exhausted brooms, ponds, mechanical apparatuses, letters, attics, and my remaining dignity, I resolved upon my final and most desperate measure. I sat perfectly still in the cellar, wearing only what modesty absolutely demanded, and waited for the heat to relent. Annabel found me there past midnight, perched upon an overturned barrel like a gargoyle contemplating its regrets. She said nothing. She simply handed me a cool cloth for my brow and sat beside me in the dark, and there, at last, I felt something resembling relief, along with a faint, nagging suspicion that one of the neighboring boys was still somewhere outside, retelling the pond story to anyone who would listen.

It was, I later learned, merely a shift in weather sweeping through the valley that broke the heat that night. Yet I remain convinced, against all evidence and all reason, that I personally negotiated a truce with the sun through sheer stubborn suffering, and that the seven brooms still standing in my hallway serve as a monument, however ridiculous, to a war I insist I won.