Freshman Fall Cappy Love Hanson

Sun sets blood orange, and a blood-orange full moon lurches up to replace it — dry-lightning moon, smoke-smeared moon, moon of wildfire harvesting the Coast Range with its flaming blade.

Day and night, the sky’s the color we swirl in plastic glasses in our girls-only college dorm: orange juice snuck up from the dining commons, cherry liqueur bought by someone’s drinking-age boyfriend, secreted in a suitcase shoved in the back of a closet.

Nine at night, the power out, flashlights dimmed to nimbuses or nothing, when flames rear over the ridge across the valley. In trance we sit and stare from balconies as swirls in the white Cool Deck tattoo our shaved calves, and stucco stipples our backs. Too hot to sleep, windows wide to any breath of breeze but letting in only a sift of soot. Trying not to knuckle teary eyes, we swig our tart-sweet concoction till our heads seem to lift, balloon-like, in the ashy air, and we imagine our building from inebriated heights — roof rouged burnt orange, palms and flax and bougainvillea inert in the roasting air.

We can hear the blaze roar now, drunk on chaparral and wildflowers, driving deer and grasshoppers with its searing whips, shooting birds out of the oaks like bullets. With crackly howls, it bellows flames and sparks, and embers bigger than our fists. Firestorms spin the inferno into twisters as we swizzle our ruddy drink, hoist our glasses, toast higher education, and slide the liquid down our roughened throats — the anesthetizing blood of our new and frightening collegiate lives.