The forecast called for sleet, grey skies, and a high of thirty-four degrees. It was a Tuesday in November, the kind of day that feels like a wet wool blanket draped over the city of Seattle.
Elias stood at the bus stop, burying his chin into his scarf. The damp cold gnawed at his ankles. Around him, fellow commuters were statues of misery, hunched under black umbrellas, staring at the slush pooling around their boots.
Then, the rain stopped.
It didn’t taper off; it simply ceased, as if a faucet had been wrenched shut. The rhythmic drumming on the bus shelter roof vanished, replaced by a vacuum of silence so profound that Elias could hear the ticking of the watch on the wrist of the woman standing three feet away.
The temperature didn’t climb; it rocketed.
In the span of thirty seconds, the biting chill evaporated. The air grew heavy, thick, and sweet, smelling not of exhaust and wet pavement, but of crushed basil and hot asphalt.
“What is happening?” someone whispered.
Elias unbuttoned his coat. Sweat pricked his forehead. He looked up. The eternal grey sheet of cloud cover was roiling, churning from slate to a bruised purple, and finally, to a searing, unnatural gold.
A bead of water on the bus stop bench hissed and turned to steam.
It was seventy degrees. Then eighty. Then ninety.
The slush on the ground didn’t melt; it sublimated, rising in thick, curling ribbons of white mist that smelled like a greenhouse.
“Look at the cracks,” Elias said, pointing at the sidewalk.
From the fissures in the concrete, where usually only hardy, brown weeds dared to exist, green tendrils were erupting. They moved with the speed of a time-lapse video. Vines thick as a man’s arm coiled around the stop sign, crushing the metal pole like a soda can. Flowers the size of dinner plates—vibrant reds and neon blues—burst open with audible pops, dusting the terrified commuters with pollen.
It was a localized tropical explosion. The humidity hit 100%. The air shimmered.
A woman screamed as a fern unfurled rapidly beneath her, lifting her six inches off the ground. The brick facade of the bodega behind them disappeared under a carpet of moss that seemed to breathe. For ten minutes, the city block was not in Seattle, but somewhere in the Carboniferous period. The heat was oppressive, heavy, and alive.
Elias took off his coat entirely, staring in wonder at a hummingbird moth the size of a sparrow hovering near his face. He reached out a hand.
Then, the wind howled.
It returned with the violence of a whip crack. The golden light snapped off, replaced instantly by the slate grey. The heat was sucked into the upper atmosphere, leaving a vacuum that the freezing air rushed to fill.
Snap.
The temperature plummeted sixty degrees in an instant.
The humidity in the air froze instantly. The massive, impossible vines stopped moving and turned brittle. The neon flowers, caught in mid-bloom, crystallized.
Silence returned to the street.
Elias stood shivering, his breath pluming in white clouds again. He looked down. His coat lay on the ground, frozen stiff. But right next to his boot, poking out of a crack in the ice-covered pavement, was a single, impossible orchid—frozen in a perfect block of clear ice, preserving its bright orange petals against the grey winter.
The bus pulled up, its wipers screeching against the sudden frost on the windshield. The doors hissed open.
The driver looked out at the shivering passengers, then at the jungle of frozen vines wrapped around the shattered stop sign. He blinked, sighed, and looked at Elias.
“Exact change only,” the driver said.
