the tornado (I)

Larry had been sleeping on the couch. I reminded him that we needed to order pizza for dinner. He groaned, glanced out the storm, mumbled, “It looks like it’s going to storm…” and promptly fell back asleep. 

I went to the bathroom, reading a pretty interesting book on the occult and Satanism—He Came To Set The Captives Free—and when I came out of the bathroom, Larry came running down the steps. He seemed rather spunky; he informed me, “There’s a tornado coming.” I thought he was joking until the Forest Lake sirens began to blare. 

“How’d you know?” I asked him. 

“Bryan called. He asked where I was, I told him I was at home, and he said, ‘Good, stay there.’ Then he told me.” 

We sat in front of the television. It seemed relatively calm outside. That’s when the rain started to come down. We crowded in front of the basement bay windows and watched the green sky above. A moment later the television screen began to flicker and fizz; Larry said, “The satellite is losing its signal.” Hail began to fall, coming down in torrents, sounding like a freight train on the roof. 

We opened the back door and leaned outside, our faces splattered with rain. Thunder rumbled, and in the background we could hear a low rumble, incessant, unstopping. Larry eyed me, said, “That’s it.” The clouds were sweeping right overhead. “It’s going to be here soon,” he said, and we crowded into a closet in the basement. 

We sat there for a few moments, and the sound became so loud that we could barely hear one another. My heart sprinted in my chest—half fear, half excitement—and Larry said, “This is when we pray.” So we prayed that God would protect us and the community. Once we finished, Larry said, “Now we bow down and cover are heads.” I mused, “So we’re Muslim now? Covering all the bases. Good idea.” He laughed at that. 

We crouched downwards, lost in the roar of the storm. Many minutes passed, seeming to go like hours. Only then did the sounds die down. We crept back into the other part of the basement beside the bay windows. 

The rain had stopped, and hail covered the ground like snow. 

Two deer crept from the woods, soaking wet, and completely ignored us as they grazed on the fallen hail. 

The power had been shot, and we decided to go and get our pizzas. We drove through town, which seemed to be a ghost town. We stopped at the pizza place to see if they had our pizza ready. The man laughed: “Where have you been? We’ve been waiting for you for an hour!” We later learned that a town just a few miles south of us had caught the tornado, and half the town lay in pieces. 

Seven people had been rushed to the hospital. 

A little boy and a little girl had been killed.