Heat Wave

I wrote this one after surviving a truly horrible heat wave in the summer of 2026.

It rolled across the country, and I lived through the kind of heat that stops feeling like weather and starts feeling like something with seriously evil intentions. The air was heavy. Everything was hot. Your body knew it, your house knew it, and after a while it felt as though there was nowhere left to escape it.

And I hate the heat. That's the phrase that kept running through my head—not I endured it, not I survived it, but I hate the heat. Which, naturally, made my writer's brain ask: What if something else could hate the heat, too?

That's where Heat Wave began.

I wanted the heat to become more than an uncomfortable setting. I wanted it to become something physical enough to push against, something that could distort reality. If a family were trapped inside a house during impossible heat, what would happen if the only place offering relief wasn't relief at all?

And then came the man in the winter parka.

I don't know why the image arrived so clearly, but once it did, there was no getting rid of him. A man dressed for winter standing in the middle of a Michigan heat wave was wrong in exactly the way I wanted. He didn't belong there. He was an intrusion from somewhere the characters couldn't understand.

From there, the story became a kind of temperature nightmare. Heat stroke becomes hypothermia. A dead air conditioner becomes something that wants to be repaired. A service call becomes something much darker.
And the desperate desire to make a house cool becomes a doorway to something that has no understanding of what enough means.

But underneath all the supernatural stuff, there's something much more ordinary that frightened me. Sarah tells Mark they're in trouble. He hears her. And he decides she can wait. That part isn't supernatural at all. I think that's one of the things I like about horror: you can take something completely impossible and put it beside something painfully believable. Sometimes the impossible thing is the least frightening part. So yes, this story came from a heat wave.

But somewhere between sweating through that summer and imagining a creature born from impossible cold, I realized I wasn't really writing about temperature anymore. I was writing about what happens when someone you love says, I need you, and you decide you don’t have time for them right now.