Out of the Frying Pan

 This is my take on the picture, below, offered by A Writer's Community as inspiration for flash fiction. 

It would have been the hottest summer on record. Plants withered, dried up and died, and wildfires cropped up seemingly out of nowhere. The west coast of North America had erupted in flames, and the smoke from the fires blocked the sunlight over much of the central part of the continent. Although small groups of people huddled here and there in relatively cool pockets--mostly in what was once Canada and Alaska--in truth, there was no one interested enough to record such a summer. Survival had become so difficult as to demand all the attention and time a person could afford to give. 

It was the same all over, and getting worse, but only one band of a few dozen humans from America had the resources to escape. The ship, named The Phoenix in one uninspired moment, rose from the flames, attained orbit in eight minutes, and from that lofty perch set out on a years long journey headed for the most likely exoplanet their astronomers could find. 

In another uninspired moment it was named “Planet B,” like, “Plan B.”  Get it? Only by definition plan A was always preferred, and this was the case here, for during the colonists’ first winter the temperature dropped to -143F, and the last survivor of the Planet B expedition was only barely able to look up at the sky and see the arm of the galaxy known as the Milky Way set behind the mountain. It contained billions of stars, old Sol among them, but there was no one out there.