Note: this is my first foray into publishing fiction.
Right before it hit, everything got scary-quiet. Like in a horror movie right before somebody jumps out to pull out a chain saw or machete. Right before the one that you know from the beginning’s gonna buy it on the way out the door.
That’s what it was like: quiet. Like what was coming down the road took a deep breath and held it for a minute or two. Maybe so it could huff and puff and blow my walls down a little more. Just saving up for the big show.
And when it quit beating its fist on the door and every wall and the roof and the howling stopped, it got scary-quiet again.
Well, not quite quiet.
Just quieter.
The only sound was the rain pouring in from where the roof used to be. And things falling out of where the upstairs used to be, landing in the middle of what used to be somebody’s living room but what looked more like a train wreck made out of wood and concrete than anything else.
It huffed and puffed and blew my walls down. All but one or so. One wall don’t do you much good, by the way. If it ain’t connected to 3 others and a ceiling, it don’t have much use.
And then there was the water pouring in. A constant draining sound that didn’t seem like it would ever end.
I looked up and saw what was left that hadn’t caved in on us and wondered where I was.
I knew where I was, but then again I didn’t. Where I lived used to have a roof. And walls.
And it didn’t have water pouring through it like a m-f.
I hate to use truncated profanity, but I ain’t never seen nothing like it, and certainly not from the bathroom of a bottom-floor apartment in Jackson, TN.
It was all things falling as gravity took over, that and the dripping and draining of what had been my life.
I heard that and those whimpering sorority girls I rode the storm out with.
Right in the middle of it all with stuff flying around and the whole place shaking like God had picked it up and was trying to see what was inside, one of them was whining about her new shoes that were getting ruined. Then she started screaming right in my left ear.
That was when things got bad.
Not just because she was screaming in my ear, but also because that’s when the roof blew off. You should of heard her when the ceiling came down outside that tiny bathroom where we were holding on to our dear lives.
If that damned tornado wasn’t going to deafen me, she was bound and determined to take care of doing that little chore herself.
I had to restrain myself to keep from slapping her.
My room’s gone. It was upstairs where the upstairs used to be. It only has a couple of walls left. No floor. Just a couple of half-there walls that don’t serve a purpose anymore.
It’s kinda like an old cell phone that you can’t text with.
What’s the point of having a phone that you can’t text with?
I keep telling Mama that same thing, but she just says her fingers don’t work well enough to make it anything she cares about, and beside she’s too old to figure our how it works.
Mama’s like most old people. She just don’t like change.
It’s probably for the best that that storm didn’t come beating on her door, cause it changed everything, and I ain’t sure she could live with it all.
Of all the things that fell out of the upstairs with two walls and no floor (so I don’t really guess I can call it “upstairs” anymore), none of it was mine. Most of my life is probably in the next county laying on the side of the road next to someone else’s. Maybe somebody will find something and get it back to me.
I doubt it though. How would they even know who to call?
I have the clothes I was wearing when the whole mess started, and that’s about it.
And my cell phone of course. It’s always with me.
My books and homework and computer and clothes and shoes—including a pair of really cute, expensive sling-back pumps that I had gotten for almost nothing —they all got blown away.
I wasn’t worried about the shoes until everything was over, though. Daddy hadn’t been in the grave hardly 6 months, and I thought I might be next.
Still, I loved those shoes. They made my calves look really good, and with the right skirt, they were just killer. I couldn’t walk by a boy without turning his head. The straight ones just about purred, and the gay ones told me how good I looked.
I’m gonna miss those shoes. I’d just started to work them. Only got to wear them once.
My car went missing, too. I’d only had it a few months.
It was nice. Only a couple of years old and supposed to last me until I can graduate and get a job that’ll let me replace it.
Mama bought it from some of the insurance money she got after Daddy died.
That was a whole other disaster, Daddy dying the way he did. And I don’t want to talk about it right now, so just shut up.
What I will tell you that happened was that I parked it in what turned out to be the direct path of the tornado. Once It was over, it looked like someone had taken a giant leaf-blower and plowed down the middle of the lot. Some of the cars were just flipped over or laying on their sides. The rest were just gone, like so many leaves I see blowing around all the time.
We found my car a couple of days after the storm. And after the insurance man heard what had happened, he didn’t even really want to come out and verify the damage. I took a picture on my cell phone and emailed it to him.
It had landed on top of another one next to an upside down truck about a quarter of a mile away from where I left it.
I had a settlement check within a week.
Everything happened so quick, I’m still a bit addled. First, everything was okay. Then it wasn’t. Then I had a sorority girl screaming in my ear.
Then, everything was gone.
Just gone.
When it all started, I didn’t know what was going on.
The sky had turned that nasty black color that always makes me nervous. And the clouds were too low and moving funny, in a circle more than like they should have been.
Storms have scared me for as long as I can remember. When I lived at home, Daddy and me used to sit up at nights when it was storming because neither of us could sleep with all the wind and lightning.
We’d sit up in the living room and watch that big old picture window that Mama loves so much bulging in with every gust. I just knew it was going to blow out with every new wind gust.
Lightning, thunder and window bulging: that’s how it went most nights.
We kept vigil, waiting for the storms to pass, ready to get everyone up and run for the bathroom in the middle of the house if it got that bad. It was the safest part of the house. We both knew it, but we never talked about it.
We just knew.
He said he couldn’t sleep because of the noise, but I have my doubts. When it was raining and she went to bed, his mama climbed up into that big old cast iron bed of hers, fully dressed, wearing a rain coat and a rain bonnet with a suitcase ready by the nightstand.
I think fear of storms might run strong on his side of the family. Right down to me.
Lord knows I have enough relatives on his side who’ve been through tornadoes and floods. I guess enough bad experiences just get implanted in your DNA until you don’t really have a choice but to be scared.
No matter what the weather’s doing, Mama can go to bed, and says that if it gets bad enough to wake her up, she’ll just get up.
Me and Daddy never could. We had to be ready for the worst.
Didn’t seem to have a choice.
So when the dorm matrons came banging on the door that evening to get us somewhere else besides the second floor, I went. I ain’t stupid, and neither was Daddy.
We walked outside to the most unearthly silence. The sky was crawling like a bunch of ants you just disturbed. But there wasn’t any sound. The sky was crawling, but there wasn’t any wind. I could hear the rain dripping from the eaves, but not much else.
It almost made me sick to my stomach because I’d sat up enough nights with Daddy to know what it meant: trouble.
Big trouble.
I’ve never seen clouds move like that: up and down and round and round. Like I said, they just weren’t acting like clouds should act.
I don’t know exactly where I rode the storm out. Just that it was on the first floor in somebody else’s bathroom and that we got the door to it closed just in time for all hell to break loose. 12 girls in a really small bathroom in the middle of a tornado.
And those girls were sissys, like I said. I just wanted to slap each and every one and tell them to quit screaming because it wasn’t going to change a damned thing, and it was getting the hell on my nerves.
I mean, if you think you’re going to die, is the last thing you want to hear a bunch of sorority girls screeching like harpies from hell?
I could deal with the noise from the storm, but they were drowning even that out.
It’s amazing what you don’t remember when the house is literally falling down around you.
God was in a good mood, I guess, though. Don’t have any other explanation.
Once the worst had passed and it was safer to get out of the bathroom (it’s never safe, by the way, to crawl through what’s left of a half-demolished house), we opened the door.
It was a mess.
What was left of the roof— and what wasn’t in the next county with the rest of my life—was in the living room. Along with most of the second story.
By the time we made it out, they had every fire truck, ambulance and police car in the county waiting. Lights flashing all night and the occasional ambulance leaving when they dug somebody out of the rubble.
They wanted to take me to the hospital for “evaluation”, but I don’t trust “evaluation”.
What it really means is that, if they get me in the door, they can charge me more than me or Mama can afford. I just had some bruises and scrapes, most of which I think were caused by those screeching sorority sissies.
They don’t seem to be able to screech like harpies without moving, and their manicures leave scratch marks.
The medic who looked me over told me to get a tetanus shot as a precaution. I told him I would, just cause he was so cute and humpy. I didn’t want to disappoint him. I have a soft spot for cute, well-put together boys, the kind I wouldn’t mind parading around in front of my family and taking advantage of when they weren’t around.
But I didn’t figure those Kappa’s and their flying manicures are that lethal. Well, at least not if you haven’t crossed them or slept with their boy-friend-of-the-week.
Or boy-friend-of-the-minute, given their reputations.
School closed down for a couple of weeks. There wasn’t any other way. The storm just flattened too many things. What it didn’t flatten got left full of broken glass and water and mud.
And cars.
They landed everywhere.
Cars seem so heavy when you drive them or try to push them, but they can fly around like seagulls on a beach given the right storm.
I can imagine mine hovering in the air for a bit before it landed in that ditch. Maybe even gracefully. I would have liked to have seen it if it wouldn’t have killed me to be there.
From what it looked like when we found it, there wasn’t much graceful about it, but I like to imagine it hanging in the air for a few seconds at least, just floating carefree before it fell out of the sky to its death.
I try to quit thinking about death so much, but I keep coming back to it. Maybe because it passed through just a hundred feet from me, and all that happened was that the walls came down. As bad as that is, I’m still here to tell this story.
Not everyone is.
Death seems to be on my mind lately.
Always.
Daddy died back in the summer. He’d been sick for a while, and we all held out hope that he’d get the transplant he needed.
The long and short of it is that he didn’t get it. One part of him after another shut down to the point that he just wore out and died. Liver failure leads to kidney failure leads to every other failure you can imagine.
Ain’t none of it pretty.
None of us really believed it could happen until it actually started to. When the blood started coming out around his eyes, though, I knew it was over.
People just don’t often start bleeding from their eyes and live a whole lot longer.
I stood there by the hospital bed realizing what was happening and not understanding how it could be happening right in front of my very face or why I couldn’t do something to stop it. We all just stood there staring at the heart monitor and watching the little peaks go down until they didn’t go up no more.
The tension in the room was so thick it almost suffocated me. Or maybe it was just me holding my breath, forgetting to breathe.
Once he was gone, everybody left the room. Everyone but me, that is. The folks from the funeral home were there waiting to take him back home, back to where he made and lived his life, and there were arrangements to be made, people to call and a body to transport.
It was as over as over ever gets.
I stood there by his side looking at the heart monitor with it’s endless flat line until I couldn’t take it any more. Then I rubbed him on his head and then pulled the sheet up over his face and went off to try and find Mama.
He liked it when I rubbed his head, even when he wasn’t there enough to know much else. I guess some things like that come through on a gut level even though you may be so out of it you can’t really understand any other kind of communication.
I never felt so alone in my life. That hospital takes up about 8 city blocks, my daddy was dead, and I didn’t know a soul to lean on.
Sure, I have family. Friends. Even acquaintances.
But no Daddy.
No one to sit up with waiting for the storms to pass. No one to protect me when they don’t. No one to be brave and tell me everything will be all right, even though I know he’s scared, too.
When all those fists started beating on the walls of whoever’s bathroom I was in, all I could think was that if Daddy were there, it wouldn’t be so bad.
We’ve ridden out so many storms together. And I was never afraid (not really) as long as he was there. He had that kind of un-Godly calm that always made me wonder if he wasn’t somehow from another planet.
All hell could be breaking loose, and Daddy’d say “It ain’t that bad. I seen worse. Been through worse.”
And then when he needed to, he’d get all of us into the hall with mattresses if he thought it might it get too bad. We’d have tornadoes touching down all around us, and he always stayed calm. He just made sure we were as protected as we could be, all without flinching or showing a raw nerve anywhere.
Glad I never had to live through anything like that before.
What I did learn, living through what me and Daddy sat up nights warding off: that debris stuff is nasty. It flies around faster and harder than I ever thought it could. A ball-point pen can kill you if the wind’s blowing hard enough.
Not the things that you think about in advance: secure your ball-point pens in case of a tornado. And also your coat-hangers and expensive sling-back pumps with the pointy heels.
I say that because I’m almost sure I got hit in the face with one of them.
God’s gotta sense of humor, ain’t he? Add insult to injury.
I’m just glad it wasn’t the car that bit me in the face.
It’s been a bad year. Daddy died in July, and I lost everything I had in January.
Well, everything but my self-respect.
I did better than those sissy girls. Sitting up all those nights with him made me a little better in a storm. I learned to be strong even when I don’t feel like it.
That’s what Granny was doing, I think, when she got in bed, ready to run for higher ground if she needed to. She was going to be ready for anything, come hell, tornadoes or high water.
She was prepared.
And that suitcase she always put by her bedside only had one thing in it, Mama told me. It was a picture of Daddy. No clothes, no pills, no nothing but a picture of Daddy when he was in the service.
She wasn’t no sissy, gonna to start screaming and crying when the wind started blowing. She was just ready.
Just like Daddy.
I didn’t have a suitcase packed, just my phone.
And when it was all over, I guess I looked like I’d paid a visit to the devil and come back. I looked like hell.
Didn’t really care, though.
I made it, and I didn’t even pee on myself. Which is more than I can say for some of the other people in that tiny little bathroom. It’s a good thing the roof was gone and the rain was pouring in. Nobody else would know where those wet spots came from.
If you’d asked me a year ago what the most important thing I’d ever done was, I’d have probably said that it was getting my education finances in order. If you’d asked me 6 months ago, I’d have probably said that it was being there when Daddy died. If you asked me today, I just wouldn’t know.
The last year or so has been just a mess and trying to compare everything to each other is all apples and oranges to me, and it makes my head hurt.
All I know is what happened. And that Daddy’s gone. And that he would’ve been proud.
Those other girls were whining and moaning, but I was smelling the air, the way it’s really fresh after a storm.
Sure, it was still raining and my room didn’t exist anymore, my life was in the next county and my car was gone.
Still, it was about the best thing I ever smelled in my life.
