I sat on the porch where I always sit, wringing sweat from my hands and squinting through the shimmery hot air. Across the street, Miss Reynolds scurried around her front yard in a frilly sunhat, undaunted by the suffocating heat and painted like a tribal warrior, sunscreen unceremoniously streaked across her shriveled old skin. Above the both of us, a clear day was speckled with wisps for clouds and the sun spread its warm embrace across the blue sky like something straight out of the ​Toy Story ​intro credits. From a distance, I could briefly make out the deafening rumble of the trucks as they passed by, their tail ends dragging across the gravel, stereos blasting with hard rock that shook our windows, drivers screeching, whooping, laughing as they went along. Miss Reynolds only briefly acknowledged the din with a deep scowl that spread fault lines of wrinkles across her face before returning to her garden with a new urgency. She crossed the crinkled brown grass quickly on shaky legs, water swishing from her can and gathering in brown puddles as she went, ripping through stands of poppies and rosemary bushes that I knew she’d been fostering for years, decades even. At her age, ​centuries ​weren’t out of the question. “Miss Reynolds?” I called questioningly. “What’s… uh, you okay over there?” Alarmed, her grey eyes shot up from beneath the brim of her gardening hat, searching my face as if she’d forgotten I was there. “Young’uns,” she cursed beneath her breath. No sooner did she resume her frantic disassembly of the front garden. “Young’uns and their guns’uns, and they’s trucks’ns. Nobody’s got my flowers, you see? Remember that, Velma. ‘Member it when they come.” I bit my lip, learning further back on my palms. “I think it’s better if you head back inside,” I urged her. “Cool down a bit?” “Guns’uns and trucks’uns,” she chanted. It had become some sort of disjointed kind of song. “They’s a big’uns and small’uns, child’uns and wild’uns.” I was just about ready to get up and call the Dementia Center– for the sixth time this month, of course– when the rumbling picked up again. I tilted my head, trying to decipher the skull-crushing music through the jostling of the tires through the scraping of bumpers along a low gravel road through Miss Reynolds’ mumbling, practically yelling now. The strangeness of it all finally worked some movement back into my stiff legs. I stumbled to my feet and tripped down the shallow front steps. Now, the noxious fumes of gas and exhaust was sharp and heavy over the street. Above us, the wisps of clouds, which hadn’t changed one bit, looked somehow different to me. “Those aren’t clouds…” I whispered to myself, panic fluttering in my chest. “It’s smoke!” Miss Reynolds growled, having appeared, pressed against the picket fence with a bundle of flowers and weeds tucked under her arm. She had no more time to explain before the sound of booming punk rock broke our hazy stillness and a fleet of heavyset trucks swerved through the treeline. Terrified, my gaze flew up to that plain, clear Toy Story ​sky, indifferently gleaming far above the grumbling engines and blasting rock music and somehow still beautiful despite how little it cared if I lived or died.