BEST SMALL FICTIONS 2025 WINNER!

Corey Farrenkopf is a Cape Cod based writer and librarian. His work has been published in Strange Horizons, Electric Literature, Nightmare, The Deadlands, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is the author of the novel Living in Cemeteries, and the short story collection Haunted Ecologies. He is also the Fiction Editor for the Cape Cod Poetry Review. To learn more, follow him on Bluesky@CoreyFarrenkopf or on the web at CoreyFarrenkopf.com.
 
Corey says: First off, thank you to Dawn Lowe and everyone over at Brilliant Flash Fiction for publishing my piece. I was so wicked excited when I learned it made it into the Best Small Fictions anthology. A first for me! This was a fun piece to mess around with. When I was in high school, I used to roof houses in the summer (and landscape/paint/general carpentry stuff also), and it was always a nightmare being on an asphalt roof in the middle of August. No amount of water would ever cool me down. I remember days where the guys I’d work with would get a little loopy, probably from the heat (but who really knows…roofers are an eclectic bunch), and sing unusual pop songs to one another and do little shimmying dances on the scaffolding…which always seemed surreal. A fall from three-stories up is never fun, and dancing just made that seem so much closer. So I tried to capture a bit of that surreality in this piece. A lot of my work focuses on climate change and eco-horror, so this story is a bit of a blend between my real world experience and projections of the future given global temperature rise. And I can’t help putting a ghost in there…they always find their way into my stories, and this one was no exception. I hope you enjoy the read.

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Roofing in Warm Weather
By Corey Farrenkopf

The idea of roofing in warm weather makes sense because asphalt shingles melt a little to adhere to the roof itself. The process helps if hurricanes are on the horizon. If you lay them down in fall, when it’s getting cold, the sun won’t bake them in place, and they’ll come right off when the wind picks up. That’s what my boss says anyway, though he tells me this from the comfort of the ground, an iced coffee turning to a slurpy in his hands.

The idea of roofing in warm weather does not take into account what the heat does to our bodies, the sweat induced hallucinations I see while I’m nailing down the peak. The apparition looks like my ex-girlfriend, Ruby, crooking a finger just beyond the edge of the gutter, two stories down to the stone driveway beneath. I shake my head, wipe my eyes, try to clear the specter from my sight. I know she’s standing on nothing. Scaffoldings on the other side. Just open air, my dehydrated brain keeping her aloft.

The idea of roofing in warm weather only gets worse each year. The climate never got this hot two decades ago when I started the job fresh out of high school. The thermometer occasionally poked a hundred, but not for days on end, the cloudless sky baking us onto the roof just as much as the shingles. But the job pays, and it’s what I know how to do, so I press down the nailgun’s trigger, firing another spike into the roof.

Until my boss gets drones up here, the crew and I will be pushing back our own unique ghosts as they attempt to call us into oblivion. I watch Mike and Jer and Ricky stare off beyond the roof’s edge. I want to ask what they see, but no one asks what they see. I’m not going to be the first. This isn’t a sharing circle. We aren’t open with our emotions. We all have someone we’d rather be spending time with than our ladders and hammers and chalk lines.

Roofing in warm weather wasn’t so bad when I was nineteen. I had things to look forward to after I stripped off my tool belt and sweat-drenched t-shirt. There was my band, there were shows, there was whatever restaurant Ruby wanted to check out that night, because we weren’t the type of couple to cook. She sang for the band, worked at a doggy daycare during the day. She always joked about the tradeoff of air conditioning for her allergy to their saliva. Grooming dogs paid well because her uncle owned the business. I can still smell her scent, the patchouli and honey and rosehips. They daubed it on her neck for the viewing, for those few minutes I was allowed to kneel by the casket and sob into her cold collarbone. But her father never liked me, and I never thought he’d drag me off the kneeler, but I also never thought there would be a day where I woke up without her next to me, but I was wrong on both accounts.

The idea of roofing in warm weather becomes untenable at a hundred and twenty degrees. One-nineteen wasn’t so bad, but one-twenty … Ricky called out, and I can’t blame him, but the rest of us need to pick up the slack, because deadline is right there, no more days left on the calendar before the next job needs to be staged and the next one after that, and the one after that.

After a while, you feel like there can’t be any more roofs, like you’ve done every last one in the state, in the country, in the entire world. But there is always new construction, houses going up where derelict lots lay fallow, some new rental property for some new app that promises fast cash for a fold-out couch and viable a/c.

I stand there with a sandpaper mouth, ready to pass out, and she appears, wearing the same band hoodie she always wore, her bangs falling in her face, that finger dragging me over to the gutter, all that empty air below. She smiles as my boss yells up from the ground, but his words are lost, just static on an untuned radio, advice for someone younger than me with less roofs behind them.

“There’s always going to be another. You and I both know this,” I hear her voice in the back of my head. “But you know what would be better than another day burning beneath the sun?”

And I do. But I don’t want to say it. Because once you say it, there is no going back, no sure footing beneath your boots. So I turn from Ruby’s ghost and kneel next to Jer as he lines up the pattern for the next row of shingles, making sure everything is going on straight, despite the difficulty of sweat slicked hands and eyes burning with salt.