Short Story Contest Entry

Hello? Is anyone out there?
In the back of your mind you might remember a little blog writer by the name of Summer, with a big blog by the name of The SummerSalt Project. It's sort of been... forever since I last posted.
It's been junior year, and I've forgotten what sleep feels like for the most part, and obviously forgotten about regular posting.
So, here's a little somethin' somethin' I typed up for an English class this year, and subsequently entered into a short story contest. (It was required.)
The topic provided was a coming of age story, and the feedback I got on the returned essay was probably the best part.
"Delicious, no calorie writing!"
I only vaguely grasp the meaning of that statement, but hopefully after reading my submission, you'll understand what it means:

Figures that the day I volunteered at Earth Day would be the same day a tornado nearly killed me. I suppose on April 16^th the karma system had some sort of a technical failure.

            The sky is the color of ogre bogies. The tent that my mom and her boss Carol had set up offers little protection from the destructive winds. Goosebumps press against the inside of my sweater and coat, and I had long ago abandoned the idea of my hair looking halfway decent. Our booth, the Conservation Council, loses more materials by the minute to the thieving wind. The white canopy threatens to follow the stolen papers and petitions, and I, with my 90-pound body, hang from the metal structure while Mom and Carol save as many supplies as they can. Just down the street, one of the cruddy plastic tables all the booths had been provided with begins to somersault across the asphalt.

            I abandon my post to grab my purse and we start the gusty trek back to the car while Mom pulls out her iPhone, which of course is wrapped in a Ziploc bag, the way she always keeps it when it rains. She talks through the clear plastic, to Dad, I assume, and we push on past the Salvation Army, which is uncharacteristically free from residents standing outside.

            The fenced lot where Mom and her coworkers park is filled with dancing litter, and a newspaper wraps its pages lovingly around my leg before I kick it away in quiet disgust. Mom opens the door and climbs in swiftly, but gingerly, hindered as she is by her newly risen belly.

            The car offers some sanctuary. Locked inside with windows up, I feel safer. Mom backs up and we drive familiar roads, the silence disturbed only by a few remarks about how strange the weather is.

From the corner of my eye, I see Mom’s right hand gripping the wheel, and her left rubbing away at the parasite. I try not to look at the vulgar scene with disgust. As an only child, and especially at the age where college is not so very distant- just two years to go- Mom’s baby seems an insensitive replacement for myself. I had long ago embraced the concept of only childhood. Now that idea had been shattered, and Mom’s bulging stomach, pressed taught against whatever gross internal fluids were at work, was a definitive wakeup call.

Like a beacon in the distance, the hundred-foot smokestack calls us to the cotton mill we call home. We pause long enough for Mom to fish out the remote that opens the dark metal gates, and then proceed around to the back of the building.

Dad is surprised to see us home so soon, but as later events reveal, he is helplessly optimistic. I run upstairs to my room to retrieve my computer, and settle down on the couch perpendicular to the one my parents occupy. I begin with good intentions to finish schoolwork, and yet somehow I find myself browsing Facebook. First item on the Newsfeed is my neighbor, Jan. Her posts typically report the latest adventures of her toddler son. Today, the 420-character limit informs me, “Holy crap! Tornadoes abound!”

I lunge for the remote and turn it to the news. “What are you doing?” Dad asks.

“Jan’s status.”

The green screen map of our local news station is enough to answer any lingering questions he might ask. The state is lit up with tornado warnings and sightings.

The raucous howls outside kick up a few decibels as if to emphasize their point.

Living in an ancient cotton mill, at this point my mind is a two-way track. One takes the half full approach: 200 mph tornado that probably won’t even happen against a building that has taken hits for the past 200 years. The other half has followed the path that’s swift and gathering speed, the half empty, one in which the images show our hundred foot smokestack tumbling down and crashing against the ruined pavement like a dropped champagne flute.

“Everyone, get in the bathroom.” Mom is always the first to panic.

I’m still not completely convinced, but I grab my laptop anyway and park myself on the floor of our downstairs bathroom, one of the only rooms in our house with no windows.

“I’m going to do laundry.” Dad on the other hand has chosen the other room in our two-story home with no windows.

Mom’s hands are rubbing away at her stomach, and I place my hand on one of hers to calm the tempo.

Then the lights go out. I had always heard that a tornado sounds like a train barreling towards you. It doesn’t sound that way to me.

Dad curses loudly in the laundry room, and as he pulls open the bathroom door, I can see our windows through the small crack, but outside I see nothing. The usual crepe myrtles are invisible in the gray that has engulfed our home.

The twister hits and the walls shake. I’m breathing so fast and so hard that it hurts. So this is how I die. This is how it ends, with drywall raining down on my head like powdery snow.

The baby.

Why had I been so selfish? If I were gone, what would my parents- my family have left? No young ones to carry on the dying Italian name. No high-pitched squeals. The pressure is so intense on my ears they feel like they may burst. No thrown green beans. I can’t breathe. No stomping tantrums.

The howling ceases. The walls are still. The snow stops.

I take a shuddering breath.

And then it all begins again.

My Mom, my Dad, and my unknown sibling: they all have to live.

Is there a metal pole jammed between my ear lobes? The pain is worse than any I’ve ever felt before.  

When the room is still once more I dare to hope. Maybe we had gone through the eye? That must have been it. I attempt (and fail) to slow my heart and breath. I realize Mom is holding my hand so hard it feels as if it might break. I don’t complain.

            And then the knocking starts.

            Boom. Boom. On the front.

            Crash. Crash. On the back.

            I can’t see Dad get up; the manufactured stars have had their fluorescent glow stolen by the wind. I only hear the bathroom knob turn and watch the greenish glow pour in. We split up. Mom runs to the back door first, and the voice sounds like our neighbor, Daniel. He’s a cop, and he looks and sounds like it. Not the doughnut eating, coffee belly kind, no. More like the Iraq vet kick-ass type. He’s ordering us to give him a sledgehammer. Apparently some people are trapped in their units. Meanwhile I run for the front door and open up to the most frightened face I’ve ever seen. Dad runs up the stairs to survey the damage.

            I cannot even process the disaster framing my 13-year-old neighbor, Rose’s face. Her large blue eyes have spread impossibly wider, and behind them, threatening to spill over, is an onslaught of frightened tears.

            “My mom isn’t home. I don’t know where she is.” Rose’s voice is so shaky that I wrap my arms around her and hold her to my still fluttering chest. “I hid by myself with my flashlight in a closet.  I didn’t know if you’d be home, and I don’t know if there will be another tornado.” Warm tears fall in great drops down my sweatshirt.

            Dad’s shoes are booming against the wood on his way down. “You lost half the roof over your bedroom.”

            At this point I’m having some success with convincing myself that I’m only dreaming. In a surreal state, I try to call Rose’s mom, but the cell lines are down and Rose’s fear intensifies. More neighbors are at the back door, shouting to Dad about holes in roofs and busted sprinkler pipes that have flooded homes with water already ankle deep.

Then Dana, Rose’s mom, bursts through the mob.

 She’s plastered by the rain still falling outside. Dripping arms pull Rose to a dripping raincoat. “I was so scared! Oh honey.” She had left her car parked on the main road. Still holding Rose she gives us the news. “All the trees in the front are down, and one took out the gate to drive into the building. But we’d better get to the basement- there are more coming.”

I don’t need to be told twice. I reach for my miniature pinscher, who up until now has been cowering, confined to the bathtub, and Rose and I run to the basement. I don’t realize my parents aren’t with us until we’re underground.

For now we’re running through a world I would never recognize as the one I had come home to: the one that was safe, secure, and predictable. Trees are splayed across the earth and cars in the parking lot. The carnage of their recent demise is smeared across the windows of each unit in horrible matted green leaves.

The storage units aren’t the most comforting of places in the best of circumstances, but now they’re a personal hell. The emergency lights are on, which do next to nothing besides casting eerie shadows on crumbling brick walls and archways. The fire alarm, which must have been triggered by the disaster, is relentless. It screams insistently from above, the system illuminating the walls at 3-second intervals. Rose’s hand is shaking in mine, or maybe that’s my own.

We run as fast as we can down corridor after corridor of repeated black doors, eerie in similarity, as if a small child had used a stamp to print out each one.

We reach the end and there’s what appears to be the vast majority of the 82 unit occupants.

All are in various stages of shock: some crying, some angry, some rendered silent.

Jan’s son Alex, the adventurous two-year-old, is inconsolable. The alarms and flashing lights are too much. I feel like screaming, too. But seeing as I can’t, being nearly 15 years older, I do my best to put on a calm face and talk with Jan. She’s one of those still in the silent stage, which is unusual for her.

“How did you guys make out?” I ask, rubbing Alex’s tiny feet. It’s not so bad, imagining those feet belonging to my sister. It’s weird for sure, but compared to what just happened, a sibling can’t possibly seem so horrible.

Jan shifts Alex to her hip and stares past me with expressionless eyes. “We’ve lost everything.”

Walking through the cluster of neighbors and desperately seeking the faces of my parents, I piece together the story. A unit closer to me, Brad’s, had the H-VAC unit ripped from the roof and carried with the wind to crash once over Carl’s unit, then rebound and finally drop onto the old wooden swing set I had played on as a kid. The force of the H-VAC pushed in a part of Carl’s roof, knocking out his girlfriend, Mindy. Incidentally, Carl also lives under the main sprinkler line, so the falling roof severed the pipes, triggered the fire alarm, and unleashed a torrent right over Jan and Alex’s home.

After pushing through the panicked crowd, I come to the conclusion that Mom and Dad are definitely not down here. I hold my dog close and run back through the corridors, still ringing, still black, still flashing, back out to nauseating sunlight. The sky is a sickly green I’ve never seen before in my life, nor expect to ever see again. At least, I hope not.

My door is open and spattered with more sticks and foliage gore, but at least the sounds of familiar voices upstairs are comforting, marred as they are by the sounds of dripping water pouring through the ceiling over my living room. I run up to my room, which I can barely identify. Everything soft has been pushed far from the gaping hole on the side furthest from my door. My couch is soaked, and brick dust and other debris litter the puddles across the hardwood floor. 

Daniel is arguing with my parents in his firm, police officer way, “-but you can’t stay the night. Or for a couple nights. Maybe even a few months. This is a mandatory evacuation until further notice. We’re cut off from water and electricity right now, and the building is structurally unsound.”

In the meantime, I place buckets around the floor and move my favorite things from harm’s way. What I’d been most worried about was my great-grandfather’s cigar box from World War II, filled with paper money and coins from all over the world. I’ve always been attached to it, and I’m not exactly sure why. 

Daniel gives the final order, and Dad turns to me. “Pack your suitcase with everything you’ll need to last a few weeks. We’ll come back when we can to get more.”

In my closet it’s dark. Dark and windowless, like the bathroom had been when the tornado hit and tore me from the only home I’ve ever known. I find my headlamp I use for camping and pack my red Swiss Luggage case I’d gotten for Christmas that year. I don’t even bother to fold; such tasks seem superfluous now. A lot of the things I had worried about just this morning when it was a normal rainy day seem so trivial: material things, scholastic tasks, even my antagonism towards the baby.

When the bag is packed so full I have to sit on top to work the zipper shut, I grab the handle and the old box of Dutch Masters. The walk down the stairs is different, like I’d been making this same trip multiple times a day, 7 days a week, without even noticing. Now it feels like a goodbye, albeit a temporary one, but temporary is a word without a definition right now. Daniel had said tonight, a few nights, a couple of months, and the uncertainty offers no solace.

Already the spectators are pouring in through the broken gates, gaping at our life like it's some sort of spectacle. Dad’s car is packed, and even the cat is mewling unhappily in her travel crate on the seat beside me.

I send hopeful thoughts like carrier pigeons through the green sunset and off to everyone: to my neighbors who had also been evacuated, to the homes that had been hit much worse, to my distant family who must be so worried, and to my baby sister, who I will never again refer to as a parasite.

It takes awhile to navigate a way through the twisted rubble up to the gate, and I look back the whole time. Will our home be standing when we return? Will it be a home at all?