Chasing Storms

This is one of my favorite pieces. It was published in Absolute last year and it actually won some award, but that's not why it's my favorite. It's a tribute to a girl I once knew as well as I knew myself, and that is something I am very proud of.

            Once I was truly happy.  For one short-lived afternoon my capsulated world was perfect and harmonized and I played as if there were no rules, no pain, and no memories to haunt me.  I was twelve, and it was the last time I felt human, the absolute last time I felt whole.

              I grew up in a small town in southwestern Oklahoma with my Grandma Carol and her fourth husband, Ted.  Ultimately I would live with many people over the course of my teenage years, but that year was spent in Grandma Carol’s bricked up trailer.  She was the kind of woman that most people meet only briefly and then walk away wondering what was wrong with the picture; the deep wrinkles, gray hair, and an obvious set of false teeth made her look like she was over seventy, but she was actually closer to fifty that year.  Most of the confusion about her age probably stemmed from the fact that she’d gotten married at fourteen and had five children by four different men before she even graced the ripe old age of twenty-eight. 

However promiscuous her early years may have been, in her later years she’d decided to make herself seem like an upstanding citizen.  So, she had Ted buy her the finest trailer, and had bricked it up on the outside, adding a carport and a wooden fence to make it seem even more like a “real” home.  Then, she’d gone to the best bargain furniture store in town and bought a whole living room set with a sofa, loveseat, an ottoman, and even a recliner that we were never allowed to sit on, lest our dirty rears wear out the seat cushions.  Every day I would clean that house on her command, scrubbing it spotless for visitors that usually weren’t even allowed inside.

Grandma Carol was a living contradiction, a world of nicotine stains and bar fights wrapped in a bricked up trailer and tied together by a top of the line Cadillac.   It was hard to know what she really wanted, hard to know when life would be good enough that I could have an approval from her that wasn’t double edged. 

            My day usually started at six thirty in the morning, and I would spend those hours before school scrubbing the wood paneled walls of the trailer, trying to remove the filmy tar coating that had become ingrained into every pore of my very existence with the false scent of lemon Pine-Sol.  By the time I got home she would have already smoked enough to give the walls another finish, my life was tempered by her cigarettes.  I once saw her smoke four cigarettes simultaneously.  For a while that made her like some type of superhero to me, able to conquer the evil side effects of smoking with nothing more than sheer determination.  A few years later, when I actually did the math on the number of cigarettes she smoked per day, I understood that by most doctor’s calculations Grandma Carol should have dropped dead over twenty years ago.  Personally I’ve always believed her secret was scrubbing those walls clean everyday so she could start with a clean slate, somehow merging the walls and the lining of her lungs into a single entity.

            The best part of my young life that summer was Ellen, with her short, frizzy hair, dimpled cheeks, and sprinkling of freckles that covered her face so precisely it was as if they’d been placed there by fairies.  She looked like a dirty angel; untouched by the worries and pain that often clouded my world. 

            One afternoon we were outside in the playhouse that Ted had made from the scraps of wood left over from some house he’d been contracted to help build.  It wasn’t much, just a plywood shell built over the back half of the tornado shelter, but Ellen and I could always manage to turn those four plain walls into a castle or a grand ballroom depending on the occasion. 

Ellen came over a lot, and she didn’t seem to mind that my grandma was a little dysfunctional.  Sure she commented on it like most twelve year olds would, but it didn’t stop her from being my friend.  And that silence bought her a true friendship that no amount of ridicule in later years could break up. 

This was before we thought of boys as anything more than friends.  Before sneaking cigarettes and beer became our favorite pastimes.  Before time and reality sucked the innocence from our lives as if it were nothing more than a station on the television that could be changed with the click of a button.  When I think back at my early childhood I see everything as a two-dimensional picture that has faded over the years, and for the most part it’s hard for me to accept that anything really even happened; that those defining moments were anything more than a dream I had a long time ago. 

                One thing I definitely remember about that day was that Grandma Carol had tucked herself into the storm cellar and was listening to Gary England’s weather reports.  She was smoking so much that a spiraling gray cloud could be seen wafting its way out the cellar vent as if she were a human chimney.  It was the middle of tornado season, and we were in the pressure cooker that is southwestern Oklahoma.  A place where the heat and rain can build up into a frenzied culmination of childhood fears and nails bitten down to the quick before the weather would suddenly Snap! letting go of everything in one giant whoosh of storms that left the charged air smelling sharply of ozone.  As I got older I associated that smell with sex because of the release of tension that was usually so sharp you could hear the collective sigh that seemed to originate from the very center of the world when it was over.  But that was only a temporary cessation of nature’s passion, and within a matter of days, sometimes only hours she would be raring to go again.  Storms were the one thing Grandma Carol was actually terrified of, and she would refuse to emerge from the storm shelter until the all clear had been given by her trusted weatherman Gary England, and the Tornado Watch had been lifted. 

She had been down there six hours before we heard anything.  Ellen and I had taken bets as to how long she could remain down there without needing to go the bathroom, and she’d held out longer than either of us had expected.  She knew that May was the culmination of tornado season.  A time of year when any normal, bright sunny day can turn into a nightmare in under thirty minutes and the heat and humidity can be as real as a fleece blanket pressing over every inch of your skin.

 Just as we were beginning to believe she had turned herself into a shelter hermit for no reason, Grandma Carol’s shrill voice rang through the thick air, warning that there was a tornado headed right for us.  Ellen and I looked at each other, the excitement lighting up our faces like Christmas trees.  We’d never actually seen a tornado.

“Marie!  Ellen! You’d better get down here right now.  I’m shutting the doors in thirty seconds.”  I can still hear her voice calling to us from that cement dungeon, but we never made it in.  I took Ellen’s hand in mine and ran to the front of the house, determined to see a real tornado, to look that god-driven fear in the face and say that I was not afraid. 

Fear was the furthest thing from my mind, but it was then that I finally saw the face of fear itself; fear was bucket of soapy water and a sponge on Monday morning, fear was a body that looked twenty years older than it was, fear was the repetition of the same thing every day until the end of my life.  This was different than anything I had ever known before, and as such it had no place in the listing with fear.  In fact, I felt liberated for the first time in my life.  I don’t think I’ve ever felt as free as I did when we rounded the gravel driveway and saw the thin spindle touch the ground.  Now I know it couldn’t have been more than an F1 tornado, but then it was a giant, the most beautiful and majestic thing I’d ever seen. 

We felt safe even when we shouldn’t have.  The wind had sprung out of nowhere, as if there were a volcano of hot, pulsating air just beneath us.  It circled around us, pulling at our hair and whipping it at our faces, punishing us by turning our hair into a cat-o-nine-tails. 

Despite every warning we’d ever had to the contrary we didn’t hesitate for more than a second before we began running through the field, climbing the low-riding fence and burrowing through the wheat towards that storm, sweaty palm touching sweaty palm the entire time, binding us to each other permanently.  Even when Ellen died four years later I still felt her small, clammy palm pushing into mine at the funeral.  The hollow roar of the wind filling my ears where the preacher’s words should have been.  The same seashell echo that is pulsating through my ears now, the unsubstantial weight of the wind cocooning me just like it did both of us back then. 

I’ve never been able to remember what happened when we crossed that threshold and stood in Mother Nature’s embrace.  Nothing I’ve tried has ever brought those lost minutes back, and now I’m not sure I want them.  The local search and rescue crews found us a few hours after the tornado, huddled together and half-buried by uprooted plants and debris.  They took pictures when they found us, the earth beneath our two curled and interconnected bodies the only area of ground not touched by the tornado.  Our trailer had been partially mangled by the force of the wind, the once pristine furniture had been torn and scattered across the lawn like vomit, and my playhouse was nothing more than another memory, but our clothes hadn’t even been torn, and not a single cut or bruise graced our bodies.  Grandma Carol proclaimed it a miracle and pronounced me terminally stupid at the same time.

The next year I was traded back to my mother in Maine, and the year after that I went to my father’s house with his new wife and three new kids in Arkansas, and the whole time I was gone I missed the embrace of the wind.  It was as if there was a vacancy in my body I couldn’t fill, no matter how many times and ways I tried.   Eventually, I found my way back to Grandma Carol’s. 

When I went back to school I found that Ellen, my dirty angel, was halfway to being a harbinger of hell.  Her face was pocked and partially eaten by her meth addiction, the careful dusting of fairy freckles transformed into symptoms of a horribly ravaging disease.  The cuts and scrapes of her tormented soul had been sewn clearly across her flesh with interconnecting lines and marks that brazenly touted her insecurity.  I think I understand now, I think she must have missed the wind too. 

Within six months of my return I found myself one of the few people attending her funeral, and the wind was with me for the first time in four years, comforting me through her death same way it comforts me now. 

Have you ever noticed how in the movies the people standing on the ledge always draw such a crowd?  It’s not true.  In fact the only thing that seems to notice my presence is the wind.  It’s been cocooning me, cradling me, and yes, even beckoning me for the last hour or so as I remain here, a living gargoyle on the urban skyline, watching the people below me move across the sidewalk in meaningless patterns; simple drones.

I stand up on the ledge and close my eyes, letting the wind work its way into my veins like a junkie begging for that last hit.  There are still no cries from those below.  No warning shouts or screams of horror to acknowledge my existence.  There is nothing, just the wind rushing past my body, the roar in my ears, a small sweaty palm encased within my own, and the weightlessness of worries floating through thirty stories of air… 

Reviews

[Tina Kline]

Kristi - This is a very emotional and very sad story. It actually made me cry, which shows
how good a writer you are. The emptiness and hollowness that life is for so many
people, the not belonging, the lack of love and caring, it captures well. And the always wanting
that one bright moment of happiness we once had and never finding it again.
A very powerful and tragic story. A painful testimony of how pain and loneliness can
destroy lives.

Tina

[Samuel Dickens]

This is a very powerful and touching story, Kristi. I saw a couple of spots where maybe a comma was missing, but otherwise, it's a terrific piece of writing. Being from northwestern Arkansas, I know about those twisters, too. Samuel