Feel The Heat

• Thomas Edwards, Grade 8
• Short Story
• 2020

I feel the insufferable heat on my face. I desperately need water to end this torture burning my body. My body is blistering and welting all over and there is no way to stop it, the heat is scorching. I see other people dropping to the floor, as shriveled and scorched as a burned potato chip. My body is beginning to shrivel; I know this cannot be real. How can it, I think quickly, wondering if I am dreaming. But it is all so real. People are dying around me, as shriveled as a body, which has been in a bath for too long. I am reluctantly seeing people become crippled around me. I know that if I survive this, I will have not have truly survived it at all. It will haunt me in my dreams, when I am walking, and when I am talking; I’ll have PTSD. I feel my body drop to the floor. I try to stand, but I cannot. I am too dehydrated. I try to think of a happy place, but it isn’t possible with such a heat pushing against me, too strong to let me stand, too hot to allow me to think straight. I think to myself, is this the end? It cannot be I’m thirteen! I continue to succumb to the heat, when, as suddenly as it started, it stopped. I am still too weak to stand, but at least I can think straight enough to know that I will not die. Then, I feel the air lose all the humidity it had gained in the seconds since what I thought was the only heat wave; but no, the second wave of the blazing heat was beginning. I see many older people who had barely survived the first wave, shrivel up and die. The older people died so quickly, they just went black as burned crisps and became as shriveled as a rotten passion-fruit. I can feel the heat on my face, sand blowing in my eyes. I cannot see where the sand is coming from, but it hurts, I can feel it ripping my eyes away, grain by grain. The sand begins to travel faster and faster until I can feel my face being cut open in many places. I quickly feel myself shrivel up and die. I wake up to find myself in a hospital bed. I wonder why I am here, I think. As my heart rate monitor beeps to inform the nurses and doctors my heart rate is becoming quicker. Many doctors run over to my bed, bombarding me with questions. The only phrase I take notice to, though, is one that a doctor said – “You’ve just woken up from a coma. Can you remember your name and how old you are?”
But I cannot. I try my hardest; trying to make my brain gain deleted information, but continued to receive the same answer from my brain. I cannot remember who I am or who I love.