There is a temperature past which the human body cannot cool itself, and on the far side of it, a healthy adult, resting, hydrated, out of the sun, dies in six hours.

Your blood runs at thirty-seven degrees. It holds there by one mechanism. Sweat rises through the pores and evaporates, and it is evaporation that draws the heat off you, on the single condition that the air is dry enough to take the vapour.

Weather stations measure it as wet-bulb temperature, the reading a wet thermometer gives once the air is too damp to dry it.

30°

Forty-one Junes on Glasgow roofs and Ewan MacAllister has never once worked one in shirtsleeves. Today the tar takes his thumbprint and keeps it, a whorl pressed into the skin of a tenement, and the tar closes soft around it and holds. Below in the back court, weans shriek in a paddling pool the colour of Irn-Bru. His flask waits in the lee of the chimney head, filled with tea gone tepid, the one that used to want drinking by ten, and today he has not touched.

Two rows of felt to go. Where his sleeves end the skin has burned pink, and no fortnight in Benidorm ever managed that. The forecast on the scaffold radio apologises for itself. He straightens, and the roofline slides apart and swims back together, and small white lights climb the edges of his sight. The ladder waits at the gable end. Ewan sets his boot on the top rung.

31°

Ōta ward has had its morning glories flower early this year, and Setsuko forgives them. She waters them at dawn, before the pavement starts its ticking. The air conditioner’s remote is in the drawer beneath Kenji’s photograph, where it has sat untouched since the last bill, and beside it an envelope marked HARUTO in her careful katakana, eleven thousand yen toward a twelve-thousand-yen baseball glove. The radio says netchūshō twice an hour, as if repetition were shade. She drinks barley tea. She folds the futon. At noon the fan pushes the same air back and forth across the tatami, and Setsuko lies down on it, just until the worst of the day passes over the house. In the hallway the telephone rings, and stops, and rings.

32°

Under the roof on Rykestraße the beams creak as they swell, louder as the afternoon climbs, loudest at three when the slates have banked a full day’s sun. The windows have been painted shut since before her landlord’s landlord. Thirty-four weeks. The midwife prescribed cool baths and elevated feet and said that August’s children come when they choose. On the sill, a fan from the drugstore melts a bowl of ice to warm water by ten, and the baby swims in slow lengths inside her. She has begun speaking to it in English, her mother’s language, the words her own mother once said over her crib.

The lights dip. The fridge quits mid-hum. The fan blades slow until she can follow each one around. Then, across her middle, a contraction arrives with a schedule of its own, six weeks early and sure of itself. Her phone shows four percent. Anke breathes out through her mouth and starts counting.

33°

Every generator from here to the Surulere expressway has developed a cough this week, and Chidi is the one man who can bring one back to life, so the roll of naira in his sock has never been thicker.

He is third from the pump on Bode Thomas, in a diesel queue forty jerry cans long, most of them holding places for owners gone hunting shade. With a season like this, he can wire his mother the money for the freezer at last, buy the torque set he has priced four times and walked away from, and give Blessing the date she has stopped asking for.

Ahead of him, an old man in a white agbada sits down on the kerb, both hands flat on the concrete, chin dropping to his chest, and when the queue shuffles forward he does not shuffle with it. Nobody turns. To turn is to lose your place, and no one this far back in the sun has moved for him yet. His can is close enough now to smell the diesel, two hours of standing almost paid off. Chidi looks at the kerb, and looks at his can, and steps out of the line.

34°

The list taped to the dashboard names three addresses, and the tank behind the cab holds enough for two of them. Her father drove this water truck for thirty years and taught her its first law, that a full load makes you the most wanted woman in Hermosillo and an empty one makes you a ghost they wave past. The city lies flat and white under its own glare.

On Calle Yáñez the Duarte boy has run a fever since Sunday, in a house whose roof tank knocked hollow the same day. Two streets over, the Herreras paid double for the same delivery, in cash, and the notes ride in her glovebox under a rubber band.

35°

Forty summers between the shafts of a cycle-rickshaw, and Nikhil knows every type of heat in Kolkata, and today the tar pushes up through his tyres hot enough to frighten him, a heat with no bottom to it, a heat that does not break when the sun drops behind the buildings. The gamchha at his neck has doubled its weight and does no work.

Out on the main road, a passenger in a pressed shirt raises two fingers, and then a banknote, twice the rate for a fare to the station. Nikhil takes it, because Priya sits her board exams in January and the fees do not care what the sky is doing, and in forty years his legs have never once given out on him.

His heart is beating in his teeth now, in his thumbs, in the soft place behind each knee, everywhere but where it should be. At the tram crossing he stops to blot his brow, and the cloth lifts away clean. He halts between the rails, a dry man in a wet city, and wipes again.

36°

The tambaqui float up dead the length of the Rio Negro, pale bellies to the sky, rafts of them drifting on the black water, and Ivete’s son counts them from the bow until she tells him to stop, because dead or alive, in this heat, none of it will sell. Her own catch lies amidships under wet sacking. She leans over the side, scoops the river up in both hands, and pours it over the cloth, and by the time she bends for the next handful the cloth has gone dry again.

One tambaqui under the sacking still works its gills, slow, and she will not kill it yet, because while the last one breathes the morning is not yet lost. At the landing Zé, the ice seller, sits in the shade of the big white chest, the only use it has left now that no ice comes upriver.

She asks anyway. He raises the lid to show her the inside, dry sawdust where the ice should sit, not a cold corner left in it, and the sun still has hours to climb.

37°

The air has reached blood heat, thirty-seven, same as mine. I write the number on the ward chart and my hand shakes, and I press harder to still it, because with the power gone these hands are all that stands between the babies and the heat. Gulnaz’s daughter arrived at nine hundred grams, four days old today, and the incubator that should hold her warm went dark with the rest of the ward hours ago. Every half hour we lay fresh wet cloth over the glass and let the water pull the heat off as it dries.

The timetable by the door lists the hours the power is promised in neat rows. The generator drank its last litre at dawn, and the fuel to wake it is somewhere across a city that has none to spare. The fan wheels slower each hour, a clock running down in front of the small lives it serves, and stops mid-turn.

In the city hospitals the machines kept babies warm. Here I am the machine, and there are three of them, and I only have two hands.

38°

By ministry order, the rock closes at noon, and Eleni works the chained gate, saying the word refund in three languages while the marble radiates the whole morning back at her. She wrote her thesis on this hill, on the quarrymen of Pentelikon who hauled the stone up bone by white bone, and the state now pays her to guard it from shoes. To the north the smoke off Mount Parnitha climbs in a straight grey column, no wind to bend it.

A Canadian in a golf visor tells her again how far he has come, nine hours in the air for this, and she lets him talk, because no words of hers would put water in his bottle or a cloud over the sun. Then the cicadas cut out. All of them, one breath, the whole slope, and the silence drops with a pressure of its own. Down in Plaka a siren starts up, then a second, and the Canadian lowers himself onto the steps of the Propylaea and goes quiet.

39°

The radio has begun christening the heatwaves, and Carmen thinks the names grow prettier as the temperatures climb. This one’s called Zaida.

Her father managed this pharmacy for forty years and swore Seville had buried worse summers than it could count. He went into the ground last August, in the first of the great heats, and did not live to see what she now knows. There is a temperature at which the old simply stop, mid-sentence, mid-step, a whole generation thinning out of the barrio street by street, and she measures out their heart pills and cannot save a single one.

She sold the last rehydration salts on Tuesday, and the paper fans went back in May. Under the till she has three glass thermometers for those who distrust anything with a battery in it. At four she winds the shutter down, and the bright street narrows to a blade of light on the floor and then to nothing. Then, knuckles on the metal. Señora Ortiz has knocked so for nine years, and tonight the second two do not come. Carmen puts her hand to the winch.

40°

Maryvale summers teach you the first water out of any hose will take skin, so you let it run a full minute, and today the minute passed and the flow stayed blood-warm. My father cut lawns in Guadalajara and called the sun el patrón, the boss who pays nothing and fires nobody, and I crossed two borders to end up on the same payroll with better lawns. My right glove split down the palm seam on Friday, and the foreman looked at my hand and told me to make it last.

The water jug on the truck gave out at ten, and warm at that. The rule out here is simple. Shade the head, wet the shirt, keep your hands off metal after noon. Six hours left on the ticket. The median grass shivers where no wind moves it, silver at the edges, and I take a knee I never offered. Then I reach for the tailgate to stand.

41°

The ice swans lasted until four, and the caterer swears on his sons that Basra has never done this to him before. Zahra marries at seven regardless, in a hall on the Corniche with four hundred guests and a generator the size of a calf labouring in the yard. Her mother pressed the dress twice and wept both times into the steam, where it would not show.

Halfway through the first song, the amplifier dies. The singer carries the line alone, one bare bar of it, and then the lights go with everything else, and the dark fills with a single held breath. Her mother’s hand finds hers on the dais. Outside, the one they hired to run the generator braces a foot against it and hauls on the starter cord, and the cord tears loose in his hand with nothing on the end of it.

42°

I dig where I live. The tombs of Qarafa give me a roof I could never afford among the living, cold marble at my back all night, and in return I open the earth for whoever the day sends down.

Today I’m sent Umm Hassan from Sayyida Zeinab, seventy-one years, who climbed four flights to her own door and died on the last step, one door, one turn of a key, from the shade of her room. Her sons want the grave dug deep, down where the dead have always lain cool, and I take their money and hold my tongue, because I have buried six this week and the cold that used to wait at the bottom of every grave is gone.

A foot down, the earth turns up warm against the blade. Two feet, no change. My grandfather worked this trade for fifty years and never once lifted heat out of a grave. Against my thigh the phone starts again. I keep the spade moving. Answering makes it two.

43°

The tunnels under Jiaochangkou cooled Chongqing through one war already, and the city has opened them again for a different siege. Ms. Lu brings her summer class down at noon, thirty-one children into the mountain’s standing chill, and on the bottom step she tallies them as the manual orders, lips moving, one finger ticking along the line of heads.

Thirty. She counts again, slower, and gets the same answer.

Yang Yang’s desk is by the window, empty. Behind her the tunnel holds its cool, and the others in it. Ahead, at the bend of the white stairwell, a faint shape lies on the floor. She is already climbing.

44°

The dates have begun to candy on the stem a month early, split and weeping sugar. Yusef works the rows pulling off the ruined fruit while the river beyond the grove runs low. His father planted these palms the year of the ceasefire and promised they would outlast him, and they have, which is the trouble, because there are only two left.

After the noon prayer, Omid stretched out in the shade of the pump-shed with his straw hat over his face, seventeen and certain that sleep is a coin he can never run short of.

Yusef calls Omid’s name down the row. The shimmer takes it. Nothing answers but the ringing of the heat off the ground.

He calls it a second time, louder, and hears the fear climb into his own voice, and the hat over the boy’s face does not move, and he drops his basket and runs.

45°

The white cotton runs to the edge of sight in every direction, two million pilgrims and every one of them dressed as Hagar is, moving on foot toward the mountain, the whole plain of Arafat and its Saudi sky swept clean of any cloud. She counted out thirty years for this walk in coins small enough to spare, and wore the same two dresses to do it. Her husband counted beside her, into the same tin, but left before it was full. She carries his name to every station, as the asphalt arrives through her sandals in slow instalments.

At the verge a pilgrim lies face down with his arms beneath him, and the crowd parts around him and closes again past his feet, and no one else stops. Hagar kneels. She pours her bottle out over the back of his neck, then folds his fingers round the plastic, hers now his. Ahead, the crowd has stopped moving. Behind her it has not.

46°

For twelve years Faisal has policed the same island in the middle of the Fourth Ring Road, and in all that time Kuwait has never once made his hands shake as they do today. The whistle on its lanyard brands him through the shirt, a hot coin he cannot take off. His buckle bites at his waist, and his watch has become a bracelet of fire he twists again and again to face the other way.

Eight lanes idle past him, every car cool inside and pumping the heat from its cabin straight into the road through the coils behind its grille, thousands of them bumper to bumper, so that the cooler the city keeps itself, the harder the heat leans on the one man out in the open. He knows the signboard up the road by heart, and today he looks at it and cannot make it say what it says. When he turns his head, the world takes a moment to catch up.

The radio crackles at his shoulder. A school bus stalled short of the interchange, air conditioning down, driver not answering, twenty-two children on the gate list this morning. Between him and that bus stretch eight lanes of moving steel. Faisal steps off the kerb.

47°

In Salah is a scatter of walls and palms in the middle of the Algerian Sahara. This well was old when the town was young. Kheira has drawn from it through sixty summers and one husband. Today the rope rises too easy, no drag, no weight fighting her as sixty years of full buckets have fought her. Over the lip slops a brown mess, more sand than water, sliding back down the stones before she can swing it in.

The rope has come up a finger lighter every week since the spring, and every week she has called it the dry season, her mother’s word for it, the word that has always meant wait, and it comes back.

Her granddaughter squats at the lip, chin on her knees. Is the water deeper in the morning, the child asks, her voice cracked, her lips gone to paper, no water passed since the sun came up. Kheira does not tell her yes and does not tell her no. She pays the rope back down into the dark, faster now, and the two of them wait on the splash.

48°

The pink roadhouse sits alone at the top of South Australia, where the sealed road ends and the Oodnadatta Track runs off red and straight into four hundred kilometres of nothing. The big thermometer on its wall reads to an empty yard. A man hired a Land Cruiser at William Creek, booked two nights, was due by noon. One name in the book, a key on its hook, and it’s well past noon.

Forty years back Marj helped lift a German kid off the tray of a ute, three days lost off the Track. Two of them carried him easy, one arm each, because so little of him was left to carry. He still had the empty bottle in his hand, held onto it so hard they buried him with it, the fingers would not come open. Eleven kilometres he had walked, every one of them away from the road, before he sat down. The men who found the tracks said the cold arrives at the very end, a mercy, so most likely he stopped shivering and thought he was nearly home.

She fills the dog’s bowl. She sets a second glass on the counter, beaded and sweating, and holds the phone in her hand not yet dialling, because out past the flywire the red of the Track has stood up and begun to move, a shape coming on through the shimmer. She cannot yet tell whether it is a man walking in or only the heat learning to walk.

49°

The salt has dried and cracked into tiles, white and square and laid edge to edge to the feet of mountains that hold no shade, and the three of them crouch to photograph it while the class goes on ahead and thins and is gone.

Nora is seventeen. Charlie is thirteen, and hers to look after today, as he is every Saturday. Devon has said eleven words to her since September, and this morning he spent four of them on the seat beside her.

They set off after the others. Three phones, no bars. One bottle, filled for a twenty-minute walk. When it goes around, Devon waves it past, and Nora only wets her lips. Charlie drinks the shares they will not take and does not know that they are theirs.

By afternoon their shirts have stiffened white with their own salt, till the three of them are the colour of the ground. Charlie’s ears blister first. Devon climbs the one low rise for the signal that has to be up there, and comes down it on the ground, past standing now, his shirt in his fist. Nora ties it over Charlie’s head. Where the sun has had Devon’s bare shoulders, the skin lifts at the edges and tears away in ribbons the width of her finger, and where it peels there is no blood, because there is no water left in him to carry any.

At four Charlie says he is cold, and Nora tells him that means it’s cooling off. She shields the phone in the shadow of her body and films. “Mom.” The word stops there, her throat shuts to a straw, her mouth too dry to shape the next, and two tears go down her face and dry before they reach her jaw. She points the phone at her brother. “He’s okay,” she says. “I’ve got him.” Charlie looks up at the phone, then at her face, which can no longer keep from him what it knows. “Nora. What’s wrong? Why are you crying?” She stops the recording, so the last thing on it is not his face when she tells him.

The helicopter comes at last light and finds them from the air. Devon higher up. Below him, Nora and Charlie, her knees drawn up, her arm beneath his head, Charlie held into her the way she must have held him as a baby, both of them still, both of them asleep on a Saturday evening.

∗∗∗

Fifty degrees needs no introduction.

Your skin is the last to give in. Held above forty-two degrees, the proteins that hold you together lose their shape and cannot get it back, the way an egg white turns from clear to white and never turns clear again.

Your body has one answer to this. It floods the dying layer with fluid and lifts it clear of the flesh beneath, a blister raised over the burn to buy the skin under it a little time.

There is no time. The blister is not a defence. It is the mark your body leaves where it began to cook, and the last thing your skin will ever do for you.

∗∗∗

30°: Ewan’s boot finds the top rung, and his heart finds the heat. The flask keeps his tea warm on the ridge for three days before anyone thinks to look up.

31°: The daughter lets herself in at six, and the phone is still ringing, and Setsuko has folded herself onto the tatami as she folded the futon. The glove goes unbought.

32°: The lights stay down, and Anke delivers on the landing tiles by the glow of a neighbour’s phone. The child breathes twice in the hottest air Berlin has ever held, and then only Anke is breathing.

33°: Chidi kneels over the old man and gives him the last shade in Surulere, his own body, and the line closes over the space where his jerry can was, and the diesel runs out one man before it would have reached him.

34°: Rosario turns the truck toward the Duartes, and the boy drinks, and lives, and the third address on the list she never drives down again.

35°: Nikhil goes down between the tram lines, a passenger steps over him for another rickshaw, and Priya sits her exams with no one to pay the fee.

36°: The last live fish dies under Ivete’s sacking at noon, and she tips the whole catch back to a river already full of its own dead. She rows home with nothing, her son quiet in the bow beside her.

37°: The nurse keeps two babies against her skin and the third alarms alone, and by the time the current returns two warm and one that the chart, if she files it right, will blame on the heat, not the nurse who had to choose.

38°: The Canadian does not get up from the steps of the Propylaea, and Eleni closes the eyes of a man who flew nine hours to see something older than death. The smoke over Parnitha climbs as straight as it did at dawn.

39°: Carmen raises the shutter and finds Señora Ortiz slumped against the metal, the two knocks that never got their answer the last sound she made, and the heart pill stays in the bottle.

40°: Miguel’s hand closes on the tailgate. The metal keeps a strip of the palm, and the blister rises slow as bread. The sun works him four more hours until the shape kneeling on the median settles onto its side and stays.

41°: The cord comes away in the hire man’s fist, and the hall stays dark. Zahra is married by four hundred phone-lights to a man she can no longer see, and the ice swans are water on the floor by the time the first guest falls.

42°: The call Mahmoud would not answer was his brother. Mahmoud digs the second grave himself by dusk, and lies down that night among the dead who are no cooler now than the living.

43°: Ms. Lu carries Yang Yang down into the tunnel, one hand still shut on the coin, lays him with the rest, and counts thirty-one for the first time all day.

44°: Yusef lifts the hat, and the face beneath it does not wake, and turns his son’s name in his mouth with no one left to answer to it.

45°: Hagar has given her water to a stranger and kept none, and the stalled crowd ahead and the pushing crowd behind meet where she kneels. The white closes over her.

46°: Faisal crosses six lanes and reaches the seventh, and the bus with its twenty-two children is found with its doors open and a traffic policeman face-down in the road beside it, one arm still stretched toward the handle.

47°: The bucket knocks dry stone, no splash, and Kheira hauls it up empty and sends it down and hauls it up empty, and behind her the child has stopped asking whether the water comes back in the morning.

48°: The shape walks out of the shimmer, and it is the German boy, forty years dead, or it is the hire-car driver, or it is only the heat. Marj sets down the second glass and goes out to meet whichever it is, because out here you do not let a person cross that last stretch alone.

∗∗∗

Outside, the temperature is climbing, one degree at a time. When it reaches thirty-seven, it will not stop there.

But we will.

---

Ashley Mangtani is a slipstream writer whose work explores ecological and social collapse, and the roles people inhabit in moments of crisis. Drawing on an M.Sc. in Environmental Science and experience as a longform fiction reader for Ploughshares, his work appears or is forthcoming in Litro, Washington Square Review, Boudin, Expat Press, Thieving Magpie, Flash Fiction Online, HAWKEYE, Mobius, Neon Dystopia, Apocalypse Confidential, and others. Read more at ashleymangtani.com