So Pucking Over It (EBOOK)

Smoke and ash.
Heat radiating up off the asphalt.
Abandoned cars stuck, literally stuck to the road, tires melted, metal rims coated with ash and oxides, windows shattered, exteriors reduced to rusted steel frames.
Car after car after car.
But no trucks. No trailers.
No sign of the woman I loved.
Embers still coated the air, choking me worse than the panic that had gripped me from the moment I’d seen the news reports, that continued to claw and twist and shred my insides as more and more time went on without hearing from her.
Hot air singeing my throat, burning my skin.
Had she felt this?
Had she felt a hundred times worse as the flames had closed in?
Heat licking ever nearer, the roar of the fire and wind giving way to this quiet, this eerie, mournful silence.
This…death.
I stared out at the hills, once covered with long, slender stalks of grass that whispered in the breeze. Those hills were now black and smoking, something out of a shitty Hollywood dystopian movie.
Except, this was real life.
Except, the woman I loved had been right in the middle of this.
Except…the woman I loved hadn’t been heard or seen from since.
And my heart, the one that had shed all the chains and armor keeping itself safe, the vulnerable organ that had opened and accepted my woman, had loved her with everything I was, had hoped, had pleaded with the fates, with the universe that this would be the first time in my fucking life that I actually got to keep the good in it.
Instead, the universe had sent us a big fuck you.
It had sent flames closing in on this town.
Fire tornados spinning through the superheated air.
Houses reduced to nothing but chimneys and concrete foundations.
Street signs melted.
Parks and trees turned to ash.
And my woman…was gone.
Gone.
All while the rest of the world continued to spin onward.