That day, it smelled of wood-smoke outside. The raw odor was hard to avoid, although there weren't any tell-tale plumes to be seen. Found out later that there were forest fires raging through Canada. The feeling, not forgotten, has only just now become clear. A hot day, ambiguous city brick on all sides wobbling. Not many people around. Likely left feeling unfulfilled by work that day. Between the cloudless azure sky, anonymous industrial blocks and outcroppings and empty hours, existence at that time seemed nowhere and everywhere at once. Could just as easily have been in any other major metropolitan void, standing outside of any other faceless construction, on any other day from then til now til who knows when. Good and bad disappeared, only a calm and faded vibrancy remaining. One could become resigned to anything. Why think of a an hour or a day or a life beyond this? You'll be here again, or perhaps never leave. An endless, gray yet glowing bright, melancholy quasi-paradise of ennui.
But somewhere northward there was an inferno. A savage land engulfed by scorching mania, everything being brought back to zero. A primeval swath where life and death were dancing on a razor's edge. Questions were being answered, definitively. How many days a man can live or pretend to without thinking that, all at once, he will have none left. Then, hints and rumors of nature's macabre exacting balance drifting, hundreds and maybe thousands of miles to tease the noses of the dazed, and the weary, and the misguided, the cogs and the wheels and the engineers. A reminder.
Perhaps some mistook it for the smell of their neighbor's cookout?
