Draft

It wasn't even mid-april yet, but you could have sworn that July was half over.
The light morning breeze was short lived and gave way to a suffocatingly stagnant heat that cooked emerald green lawns into crisp yellow cinders before the sun had reached it's menacing apex in the sky.
Even sidewalk gutters seemed parched and thirsty--their dusty throated grates gasping at the thought of a burst pipe or a chance summer storm.
Harper sighed heavily as he smeared the persistent sweat beads from his glistening forehead. His rag was soaked and he had now been waiting forty minutes for the inter-city thirty six.
"This heat" he thought "could kill you."
Again he smudged the salty streak on his brow.
Long and fluidly writhing heat waves floated off the radiating blacktop and distorted everything in view to a dizzy, miasmic stumble. Harsh yellow white sunstreaks all but drove quivering shadows into submission, obliterating entirely those not swift enough to take cover. Tops of trees rustled a little in a hot breath of a breeze, their flaglike leaves weakly waving a pathetic surrender.
Images of the heat remained even when he clenched his eylids (though it did little good to keep the sweat from stinging them). Eyes closed, he still saw the heat swirling around him, the timid shadows seeking refuge beneath the soles of his shoes even as he lifted them sticky from the sidewalk, and felt the damp warmth of his rag as it scrubbed his face for the thousandth time that day.
He pictured the neatly lined row of trees across the street, utterly motionless against the thin blue sky that seemed to be rising and stretching like a hot air balloon being filled with fire--then, a deafening blast and a searing white light penetrating every inch of his peripheral like staring into the sun in every direction. A tidal wave of furnace blast air engulfing, scorching, vaporizing. He watched the trees across the street pop in succession like white dandelion globes blown clean by a shotgun--the cindered trunks floating away with the seeds before ashing completely. The ground began to split and bright orange cracks raced along the roadway just before everything melted--sidewalk, buildings, and grass turned glowing magma.
His glasses flew off first, followed closely by his backpack, clothes and skin. His bones held a split second longer--like the frame of a tin shack in the face of a hurricane, before being whispered to ashes: His shadow smeared thirty feet across the pavement.
Then, after the winds and the roaring, the burning and bursting, the cracking and melting, there was nothing but darkness and smoke. A rolling, reeling, and bellowing rumble carried everything away on a desolate wind.
The pneumatic doors hushed and he opened his eyes, once again feeling the hot sting of sweat on the corner of his lids.
How would he tell her what he had seen? What he had been dreaming of night after night?
More importantly, how would he find out what it meant?
He stepped up into the tran car and began the long journey to Anchorage.