She was up in a tree, clinging to the branches as they bucked and swayed. Fire licked the bottoms of her feet, and she pulled them up higher, hoping to escape the heat. The earth beneath her was scorched, blades of grass surrendering their fragile lives to searing flames. The tree she clung too was slowly blackening from the bottom up; soon it too would be ash.

To her left, she could barely make out the back of her house through the burning black smoke. Her eyes stung, and tears slipped down her soot-covered face as she realized the house was nothing more than a burnt out shell. The charred wood struggled vainly to hold up the crumbling roof as gentle, slow moving waves of flame climbed up its surface.

The sky was black from smoke. It seemed as though the very clouds had been set ablaze. Through the haze she saw the shadowy shapes circling. Still hungry. Her fingers dug into the tree’s firm bark. Would they see? Would they see the one thing they had left still breathing?

No one had believed her when she told them that They were coming. Not even her husband…Her heart clenched at the though of him. Her sweet, gentle husband whom had almost had her locked away in an institution when she had looked up from the book she was reading and proclaimed that the dragons were going to incinerate the earth. She had tried to prove it to him. Tried to prove it to them all, thumbing through pages and pages of medieval literature…showing them the signs.

Her fingers were raw against the tree bark, and she almost laughed. The tips of her fingers were crisscrossed with tiny paper cuts, courtesy of the endless books she had paged through. All this pain, and they hadn’t believed her. And her husband had forced all those pills down her throat in an attempt to “cure” her.

It was ironic, she thought as she looked at the burnt out husk of a house. She was “cured” and he was a barbecued hunk of meat lying on the kitchen floor. She almost imagined that she could smell the scent of his cooked flesh wafting through the scorched air.

The flap of a leathery wing brought her back to the present, and she turned her head and locked eyes with the dragon. Still holding the brittle branches, she reached out one hand and touched the creature’s head, fixated on its ruby eyes. They were all dead, everyone was dead and here she was left to make the first contact.

The dragon regarded her for a moment before lifting off again, its tremendous clawed feet pushing up from the blackened ground. Its mouth opened wide.

Not wishing to observe her own demise, she turned her head and caught sight of a blue glimmer. The in-ground swimming pool, such a shocking splash of aquamarine color against the bleak landscape. A rubber raft bobbed innocently on the gentle waves. She sat in her tree, transfixed, the shimmering blue holding her captive.

The water called to her, promising a reprieve from the scratchy, smoky air and the claustrophobic heat.

The dragon let loose with a tremendous orange ball of flame, reducing her tree to a pile of ash within seconds. But she no longer sat in the tree; instead her bare feet moved slowly over the steaming earth. She was seconds away from relief.

She plunged into the blue water, feeling it close in over her head. The soot released its hold on her face and drifted away in black plumes. She sank to the bottom, the cool water soothing her burnt body. Her hair drifted above her head like a silk curtain, and she could almost imagine it was an ordinary summer day. Her lungs began to beg for air and she refused them, not wanting to breathe in that scratchy, hot smoke. Instead, she opened her mouth wide and breathed in the cool blue relief. Within moments, she felt herself let go.

“Listen, Dr. Carver, she’s not making any sense! You need to up her medication—she’s been sitting outside in a tree for the past hour! No, I won’t hold—hello?” Standing in the kitchen, the man on the phone let it drop with a groan. Outside, the sun shone brightly on the green grass. A glint of sunlight on water caught the man’s attention, and he looked out the window just in time to see his wife disappear into the swimming pool.