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A July Apocalypse

A July Apocalypse

Last updated on: July 17, 2026 at 1:21 am by Mary Pezzulo

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A July Apocalypse 2026-07-17T01:21:10-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

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A sunset in a yellow, hazy sky

image via Pixabay

The apocalypse began at the lake.

Early in the week, Adrienne and I took Jimmy’s boy to the lake for an afternoon of noisy fun. We splashed in the warm brown water, and played bumper cars with inflatable rafts until we were dizzy. Jimmy’s boy found a great big patch of lakeweed and tried to get me to wear it for a hat. We sat on the dock to dry out afterwards, and he wanted to know the name of every beautiful bird that flew overhead: the redwing black bird, the purple martin, the gull. Then, a few days later, Adrienne and I went to the lake again for a quiet trip. Adrienne read a book on the beach while I swam my meditative laps. The next day, Friday, the state park found elevated E. Coli levels in the lake, and had to close it for swimmers. Usually, when this happens, the bacteria levels go down within a day or two. This time, the lake has been infested for a week.

After the weekend, the severe heat returned. It wasn’t quite so bad as the Independence Day heat wave, but it was brutal. Heat shimmered off the pavement when I opened the door to duck out and tend the garden. The plants in their containers drooped ever so dramatically if I didn’t soak them twice a day, and the plants in the yard looked tired and yellow. I had to run the car with the air conditioning going full blast for at least ten minutes before I could get into it to go anywhere. And I couldn’t go to the lake to cool off.

All across the country, the news was grim. There was an intestinal parasite outbreak whose cause hadn’t yet been tracked down, because the CDC stopped monitoring it last year. Ohio was at the epicenter, though Jefferson County itself only had one documented case. My friend from another state said she got painfully sick from a bag of salad. I was grateful that we had the garden to eat out of. And then another friend posted to social media asking for prayers, because her family was trapped in a flash flood in Austin. I started helplessly at the video of the water rushing through their yard, engulfing the swing set and the back porch. They had to take refuge in an upper room until they were rescued. Their downstairs was soaked and they lost their library, but they are alive. Two other people in Austin are dead.

I watched another video of the protesters in Maine, and saw that photo of “THIS IS BLOOD” scrawled on the pavement near a brown smear. ICE agents had murdered two more human beings, one in Maine and one in Texas, neither of them criminals, one of them not even undocumented– not that it would matter if they were. And then I saw that ICE had caused a third death, pursuing a person until they ran into the path of a truck. It was so dark, so ugly, so pointlessly cruel, and yet the backlash was muted. It wasn’t like in the winter. I think that Americans are beginning to get used to the cruelty.

And then the smoke rolled in.

There is a wildfire burning up in Canada. It’s been burning for days. Today, the plume of smoke descended over the Great Lakes and smothered the northern United States.

When I woke up, the sky was hazy as if we could expect a cooling rain, but it did not rain. That wasn’t a cloud overhead. It was soot. When I went out to water the garden, the air smelled strongly of burning wood. After I came in, my skin prickled and itched for an hour. Then it got worse, and worse, and worse. The ominous smear of color on the weather map went from yellow to red to deep purple. The City closed the municipal pool so that nobody would congregate outside. I had to bring in the cat– not even into her basement room where she sleeps when it’s cold out, but into the living room where there’s a window air conditioner and a HEPA filter. She stalked around the room, peering at everything in great suspicion. And then it got worse still.

When I went out to water again, I had to wear a paper mask to keep from choking. The air was sharp with charcoal. The sky was drab yellow canvas. The headlights of my neighbors’ cars were shimmering suns in the mist.

The smell of burning wood through a sterile medical mask flashed me back to 2020 and 2021.

There was that anxiety and helplessness again, just waiting for me to unearth it. The isolation. The fear. The shortages. Adrienne’s terrible loneliness. The murder of George Floyd, and the subsequent riots. Watching he National Guard tank rolling down Broad Street in Columbus, past the cathedral where I was baptized. The stalking neighbor losing what was left of her mind and abusing us for months and months. The revelations that began in Steubenville 2021, when the world began to find out for certain that the religious movement which I had been a part of was a vicious cult with a narcissistic cult leader masquerading as a holy man, and a pack of other narcissistic men doing his bidding.

The word “apocalypse” means “revelation.” It doesn’t really mean “disaster,” though it’s often used to mean “disaster” and that is how I’ve used it just now. It doesn’t mean “end of the world,” though it often feels like one– and, sometimes, we wish it was the end of the world, because the end of the world would be easier to bear than the world going on after and apocalypse. An apocalypse is just a revelation. The mask is ripped off, the curtain is stripped away, the veil in the temple is torn, and you see what was hidden. It hurts to live through an apocalypse. It hurts worse than anything I can say.

All I want is an ordinary, normal, commonplace life, and to never see another apocalypse. But I don’t know if “ordinary” will ever happen again.

My stomach twisted in a hard knot.

I came in, itchy again, eyes burning.

They say it will be worse tomorrow.

Maybe it will end over the weekend, when it rains, and he heat wave goes back down.

Maybe this is just the way things are now.

The sun disappeared in the yellow haze, and it was night.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows an d Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

Steel Magnificat operates almost entirely on tips. To tip the author, donate to “The Little Portion” on paypal or Mary Pezzulo on venmo

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