Here’s to our firefighters.
Once a year, my homeland starts burning. And the warriors of water and soil stand against it.
We’re seeing thousands of homes evacuated and are hoping for the best. This is the start of another dry summer in Colorado, and I expect we will see more and worse fires later.
Please keep our firefighters in your prayers, thoughts, and hearts. Our teachers create the future and our soldiers stand on the walls to protect it, but our firefighters place their wit, their strength, and their very bodies between us and a threat that will probably always be fiercer and more implacable than any of our disgruntled neighbors, a roaring beast that would indifferently devour lives, crops, and houses of learning: and that beast is wildfire.
If you’re the praying type, pray that our firefighters over the coming hours and days will have the resources they need, where they need, when they need them.
Stant Litore
Update: Well, damn. The sky just filled up with smoke and now there’s ash falling. An hour away, thousands of homes are being evacuated. Here comes the darkness and flame.
Our firefighters are in for a long night.
Stant Litore is a novelist. He writes about gladiators on tyrannosaurback, Old Testament prophets battling the hungry dead, geneticists growing biological starships, time-traveling hijabi bisexual defenders of humanity from the future. Explore his fiction here. And here is one of his toolkits for writers, and here’s another book where he nerds out about ancient languages and biblical (mis)translation. Enjoy!