prompt "spirit" title "the weather outside is frightful" in "the next big thing" flash fiction

We kept coming back around to that lyric “it never rains in Southern California, it pours” which is true enough, both literally and metaphorically. In the places where there isn’t often rain, even sprinkles feel like torrents. In dry lands ruled by cars, when the rain does come, months of spilt oil bubbles back out of the pavement, rendering highways as rolling slicks. And, yes, when you are surrounded by sunshine and fake-it-til-you-make-it positive thinking, negative emotions are indeed amplified in the harsh relief of the endless blue skies. When everyone else around you is pretending they aren’t hurting, your hurt stings all the deeper, loneliness all the more despairing.

What that song doesn’t mention, however, is the snow. It never snows in Los Angeles, of course, because of the deserts to the right and balmy ocean breezes to the left, yet once or twice a year I would see it snowing anyway. Little flakes falling from the sky and landing soft as angels upon your car’s hood, except the flakes don’t melt. A few times a year, there is a dusting of ash from the wildfires in the suburbs north and west. It never snows in Southern California, it burns.

As far as Frank’s people or the Amazing Mitzi’s sorcery could ascertain, this was not actually a part of the magical curse on Los Angeles, much as snowing ash on the semi-regular sounds like something positively Sodom and/or Gomorrah. Not directly, anyhow. If you build a city on the edge of desert scrublands and let it sprawl like mad until the exurbs are inexorably those parcels shoddily reclaimed, you’re going to end up with a lot of fires on your hands. You will lose your chunks of Sylmar trailer-parks, smooshed up against the rock. The tract homes of the racist cops that bought up distant Santa Clarita so as to never see their victims in the Albertsons dairy aisle, the odds are they’ll all eventually flash to cinder, given enough time. The Moorpark strip-malls, the McMansions north of Glendale, the geography and climate just do not allow for permanent dense habitation. Nature wants it all to burn and, at best, human technology can only delay that.

Maybe that’s just an unintended side-effect of making a place a roach-trap for failed seekers and successful narcissists. This world is so stacked with both of those creatures, anywhere you set up such a lure would eventually be overwhelmed and the weaknesses of that local biome would end up exposed. We use up the water, we pave over the roots and the fire inevitably comes.

Maybe it’s magic, maybe it isn’t, but some mornings you wake up and feel for a moment like the holiday spirit arrived in a full Christmas miracle, look at that festive dusting out there. Then you remember where you are, you remember when it is. That isn’t Jack Frost’s kiss, that’s someone’s house from twenty miles northwest. It never snows in Southern California, no, it just burns away.