Tornado Girl

Writing prompt #3 from @write with Spike https://open.substack.com/pub/writewithspike Write down the story your friends and family are entirely sick of hearing you tell.

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Once upon a time, a long time ago, in a small town, on a 2 Lane Route 66 Highway connecting Joplin, Missouri to the small one stoplight town of Aurora, there was a tornado that decided, as midwestern tri-state tornadoes will do, to set down upon that particular road, in which a small girl 7 years young and her blended family were traveling home from the JC Penny’s in a gray-green station wagon with waxy exterior wood panels.

Riding in the back backseat facing backwards, the small girl was suddenly jarred out of her excitement. As she held tightly to the oversized paper bag which held her much coveted new school clothes, her daydreaming turned to high attention which turned into immediate paralizing fear upon hearing the stepfather who was driving the 19 foot tank, scream “tuck your legs in and hold on to yourself and DON’T touch any metal!”

As the wind howled its unknown words in a foreign language and blinding rain and hail immediately blanketed the steel and pleather monstrosity in darkness, the girl lifted her head enough to see a tussle of what looked like chicken feathers float by in slow motion, while large broken branches full of leaves flew across the road in front of her as she traveled looking behind. She felt the unearthly tilt of the ground underneath giving way, and the station wagon’s motion rocking forward and down as the backend raised like God himself had plucked them up and turned them into a pencil, with the girl being the squishy eraser.

A roaring and deafening sound pierced the immediate blackness outside the windows, and the little girl thought it had to be a bad dream or even a movie like the one with Dorothy that she wasn’t a fan of because she always remembered being told by her Mother how they all laughed while watching the part when the Monkeys flew because the little girl ran behind the couch and wailed like Sarah Bernhardt. How strange she thought to laugh at a crying child.

And in that same instant, as the car seemed to be haphazardly flying, it appeared to land delicately on the other side of the road, heading towards a culvert, while the sound of the screaming wind slowly dissipated and was replaced with the last “thunk thunk” of heavy hail on metal.

A hazy green glowing sky followed the darkness and the windows were unbroken which seemed unbelievable. The engine was still running, and the car lurched forward, which to the girl in the rear facing seat felt backwards.

It seemed like her life had suddenly been split into two realities; the life where the little girl knew what it felt like to be secure and alive in this world on the ground, and the life that the little girl knew to be snatched up and kidnapped into the sky and then in a ridicule of fates, thrown to the ground.

The wood panel station wagon drove out of the ditch across both lanes through mud and branches and hail. The brothers in the car screamed excitedly, because to them the experience was, a very exciting and awesome one. The stepfather and mother laughed nervously in an annoying way that did not signal calm or concern. The little girl sat frozen like a statue, curled in a ball, legs feeling like pins and needles from being tucked under her arms, as her head folded down in her newfound position of young lady because she was wearing the most uncomfortable training bra that could have been made. She perched in disbelief and reverent silence; terrified, and she lived her life always seeming to be waiting for the next tornado.

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