Tornado Warning, by Matthew Zanoni Müller

The Kramers had one of those old flat black plastic weather radios on their kitchen counter that screeched to life as Catherine and Eric headed for the door. They were house-sitting for the Dean of Eric’s graduate school, who lived just over the border in the Berkshires. The wailing radio siren stopped them before it dropped to the repeated screech screech screech of the static preceding the announcement of the weather report spoken by a man in the windy cluttered signal of an AM radio: “. . . warning, tornado warning issued for Western Massachusetts. . .” The couple wavered in the door, stuck between listening to the report and heading out to the car so they could run into town to get some new sneakers for Eric’s marathon training.

“Let’s just go,” Eric said, his arm braced over her head in the doorframe.

“Wait,” she said. “This is a tornado we’re talking about.” Eric had a tendency to gloss over things that were inconvenient.

“We never get tornadoes here, or barely ever,” he said.

“Exactly,” she said.

He sighed.

The national weather service listed the affected counties and advised its listeners to “take cover; take cover.”

“Look babe,” he said, pointing upward. “There’s nothing. Not a cloud in the sky.”

They stepped into the yard to get a better look and he was right, not even a scrap.

“We’ll just do a quick run into town and come right back. No harm, no foul.”

“Fine,” she said, though it seemed to him like she didn’t really mean it.

–

On the way to town there was a perfect blue sky with no sign of trouble. They drove along the country roads, smooth and easy. It reminded her of the first days of their relationship, free and open, when he’d pick her up after work and they’d grab takeout, go for a hike, or head into town for a bite to eat. How sometimes they’d drive just to be together.

Soon enough they arrived outside the outfitter’s on main street. As he held the door for her, Eric checked the sky one last time. Above the row of scalloped stone façades, a cloudy tuft of black wool appeared, all teased out by the wind, as if it was reaching for them.

Take cover, the warning had said, and he skipped inside, smiled broadly at Catherine as if he hadn’t seen anything at all, and followed her down the stairs to the basement. The silver racks of clothing hung in dim silence against the audience of sneakers on their floating shelves along the wall. If there really would be a storm, he’d get away from it just in time, he thought. He’d get lucky. He always did.

–

A clerk who was probably in his early twenties, roughly their own age, and whose glistening dark gelled hair was slicked forward into a spiky swoop, emerged from a grey doorway in the back. His teeth were bleached white, his eyebrows threaded to cartoonish perfection, and his skin so smooth that it could only be makeup. He wore dark-rimmed glasses that were likely fake. It was as if he had ordered a face-kit and assembled it all into this mask of a person. Catherine wondered if anyone fell for this highly manicured superficiality.

They realized that they had all met each other at a party before. Eric was test running his sneakers up and down the aisle and said, “Oh man, I remember you now, I must have been too drunk when we were hanging out to place you.” The clerk snickered knowingly, and Catherine scoffed. Eric never drank more than two beers, hadn’t even been drunk the entire time she’d known him, which was three years, and now here he was pretending to be some party animal for the sake of this fake mannequin of a person. Why was he aligning himself with this tool? Maybe they were more alike than she wanted to admit, Eric with his blond hair in a side part, his salmon-colored shorts, the blue polo with the little anchors on it, the aviators tucked into his open collar, his boat shoes neatly placed next to an open box. She’d been so proud to support him in his studies, and now, with his graduation not far off, she wondered what he’d do with+ the new earning power he’d likely get. Would he just become one of these rich New England WASP types? He was already wearing the costume.

Eric, on the other hand, smirked self-satisfactorily, knowing that Catherine would have picked up on his lie. She would have seen how he was trying to be polite to the clerk, since both of them had clearly not recognized him. Eric had fixed this bit of rudeness and was happy that they had a relationship strong enough to communicate in these secret ways, making fun of the clerk who probably “partied super hard.” He thought of the couple times in their relationship when he had said, “I love you,” and actually meant it: that time on her front porch when they were first getting together and it had felt like an admission; and that time at a restaurant a year later, for their anniversary, when she studied the menu with such a lack of self-consciousness that the self-evident nature of their togetherness dawned inside him like a kind of miracle—the fact that, in all of these small ways, she had chosen him and didn’t seem to have any second thoughts about it at all—so that when the words came out of his mouth, almost as if he had thought them aloud, she raised her face, flushed, surprised, and bent forward to kiss him across their place settings.

–

As Eric was getting out of his third pair of shoes, the overhead lights flickered, went out, left them momentarily in darkness, and then blinked back on. Catherine and Eric tried to read the level of seriousness in each other’s faces, just as the store’s manager rushed down the stairs with her permed brown hair bouncing with each step and said, “You guys gotta come up here and see this. It’s that tornado they were talking about on the radio. I’ve never seen anything like it; the whole sky’s black.” Eric cast a quick look at Catherine again, but it was as if she’d gone blank, as if someone had turned the power off inside her and she’d shut down. A perfect animatronic doll, with her short black hair in a pixie cut, her white blouse, her tight jeans cut to just above the ankle, the black canvas slippers she was staring past with her glass eyes. All perfect, he thought, except that tattoo of a bird on the top of her left foot, trying to flutter out of her slipper.

He had no idea what she could possibly be thinking, though he often felt that way.

Probably she was blaming him for coming into town.

–

It was dark out, the whole sky blackened over with only a green seaweed-like stream running through it. The air below was in a static freeze above the white pop of the blooming pear trees along main street. The gathered crowd had come out to stare up in common wonder at this total eclipse of the light, as if it wasn’t a sign of approaching calamity, as if a sudden wind wouldn’t descend to lift the rooftops off the buildings and pull the glass from the storefronts and send all these spectators up into the sky. It was incredibly stupid of them just to stand there, Eric thought, and he got the urge to grab Catherine, tuck her under his arm, and run off with her to safety.

“They say it’s coming in from Lee,” Colleen, the manager, said. “If you two get out of here now and head in the opposite direction, you should be able to outrun it.”

This was good advice, Eric thought, and he got ready to move out, though Catherine was stuck in some kind of reverie, which, again, he couldn’t read.

She was thinking back to the first big tornado that had blown through some years before. It had torn along the outer edge of town, taken out the fairgrounds, and crashed into the mountainside where it left a massive stony gash that was still visible. Somehow, all of this reminded her of Oliver, who, even though he had cheated on her at the end, had been able to do just that to her: tear through her life, lift everything up she had known and place it down somewhere new. All reconfigured. She had had to scramble to figure out exactly who she was and what she wanted afterward, which had given her enough clarity to wind up with someone solid like Eric. Though now she was beginning to question all the reasons she had ended up with him to begin with: he was too predictable, like an old boring machine charging ahead with his ingrained coordinates that he never bothered to question. She had the urge to upend the machine, drag it under ground, smash through to its core, and rewire it into a complex living organism.

–

Once they got moving, Eric felt immediately better, even with the uncomfortable sensation of being exposed to the storm out there on the public sidewalk. There was no way to take cover, as the radio had insisted, and Colleen hadn’t invited them back into the store to ride it out in the basement. Just ahead, in a crowd that had gathered outside a pub, he recognized this kid Derek.

“Come on, let’s go around,” Eric said, and they made a wide arc. He made the mistake of checking to see if he’d been spotted, and Derek’s eyes had landed on him and he was sure the face had broken into recognition. Eric ignored it, pretended this kid he’d gotten drunk with by accident one night wouldn’t remember him at all. The thing is, he never got drunk, but after playing tennis with a buddy, he’d been introduced, and Derek, who everyone in town seemed to know and love, had just hung out, listened to everything Eric had said with this appreciative smiling nod. Eric’s enthusiasm to keep talking, to keep sharing, ran off with him, and soon they moved from a café to that exact pub, just the two of them, and he was buying Derek round after round, and it wasn’t until near midnight that they left, Eric with a hollow, raw, embarrassed and thrilled vulnerability opened inside him. He had told this kid everything, everything about his life, from his dull insurance salesman father, to his uptight mother, to Catherine, who rode horses on her father’s farm, a place they’d bought when land was cheap and horses needed rescuing.
“She’s too good for me, man,” he’d said. “Too fucking moral. And too fucking wild, to be honest.”

Luckily, Catherine was still all tranced out, hadn’t noticed, and let him steer her to their car.

“Imagine if the storm just blew through here and lifted the whole place up and they’d have to start from scratch? Do you think they’d build it all the same, or would they try to make it all new and better?” Catherine asked.

She always had these hypotheticals.

“Probably won’t happen,” he said, as he got his keys out.

“Yeah, but if,” she said.

“I’d rather just think about getting us out of here,” he said.

–

As they got to the car, they shut their doors, strapped themselves in, backed out, took a left, a right, another right, and got out onto Main Street where people were still gathered outside the store fronts with their faces tilted toward the dark. Soon they were making good progress, just tapping the brakes a little as they maneuvered through a blinking yellow light. It was just like during races when Eric started to blow by people and an inner sensation of superiority established itself: he had trained harder, eaten better, made smarter decisions, and, if he were being honest, was just blessed with better genes than them which, again, supported his belief that he was, in some fundamental way, better than most people, especially those suckers who were standing outside waiting to get blown away by a tornado.

Catherine leaned over him to peer out his window and said, “It really does look bad, doesn’t it?” It seemed like she was out of her trance and they began to discuss whether they were actually going in the right direction. It was impossible to tell, really, it just looked so bad everywhere and the storm was masked in all that black sky so who could tell?

“I really can’t, Eric said.

“Me neither,” Catherine said.

–

Since they were headed west anyway, they decided to head back to the Kramers. As they left town they passed the big stone structure of St. James Church, where Eric remembered once having gone to perform in a Christmas concert when he was in high school. A girl from his choir had taken his hand, run with him through the hallways, pushed open a door, and taken him to the freezing darkness outside. They had found a niche in a corner where the stone buttress met the main building, hidden from the road and hidden from the parking lot. Here she pressed him against the masonry and told him to kiss her. She had brushed her dark hair from her forehead like a shadow, and her mouth had been warm and her cheeks cold. The knowledge of everyone inside rehearsing was like a faraway lantern whose outer edge of light just barely reached them, as if they were pressed up against the whole cold stone structure of religion, this ecstatic moment like a flame burning at the wall of its rules.

The memory skirted across his consciousness, registered for a moment in his chest, and then relinquished itself.

Catherine would have liked a moment like that, he thought.

“I kissed a girl outside that church once,” he said.

“What? You?! I never thought you’d blaspheme like that.”

“I’m very blasphemous.”

“Maybe you’re more of a bad boy than I thought, though I’ve already dated a bad boy once and I don’t know that I could go through that again.”

Eric got that emptied out feeling whenever she brought up a past lover, like everything good in him drained out and left him empty and shaky. Why ruin their banter? He didn’t like that there was some guy out there, some “bad boy,” who had somehow been too much for Catherine to handle. And now, he, Eric, was just some tame boring guy who was easy to get under control. No bad boy, this one. Plus, this bad boy, Oliver or whatever his name had been, hadn’t cared about her enough to treat her right, so he had just dropped her. Cheated on her. Did whatever he wanted and now he, Eric, the good guy, was supposed to come along and make everything better even though the other guy had fucked it all up. And, even though he was helping her through her insecurities, there was also probably some part of her that didn’t thrill to Eric the way she did to Oliver, that probably thought he was a little vanilla, a little basic, just a good old boring person who wouldn’t do anything wild or rash or exciting. That was his reward for not being a dick. She’d probably like him more if he was one. The irony. Clearly he was being played for some kind of a sucker. Fuck.

Then again, he had brought up an ex too, and she had been mature about it, even joked about it, which actually also hurt a little.

She was either more evolved than him, or he couldn’t make her jealous.

Either way, he wasn’t going to let her know how easily she could make him feel small. That she had this power over him.

–

A massive rain drop smacked the windshield as if someone had flung it at them out of the clouds.

“Jesus,” Eric said.

Another hit, then another, and another after that, followed by a full sequence that cracked against the windshield like fireworks. And then the full rain came on hard. Eric turned the wiper blades up as high as they could go. The windshield fogged along the dash and spread up the glass. Catherine adjusted the blowers and held her hands over them to test the air.

“Nothing like driving blind in a rain storm,” Eric said.

“A true delight,” she said.

The houses became less and less frequent the farther they got form town until only intermittent driveways were visible at the edge of the woods.

Catherine turned on the radio as if there was nothing else of significance to say, and a country song came on, followed by a commercial for auto insurance, a restaurant with great wings, and then the Eagles song, “Hotel California.”

“God, can you change it, I don’t want that stuck in my head for the next twenty years.”

“Yeah, I’m just trying to find out more about the storm.”

“Sure,” he said

The NPR station played music, went to a break, and then informed them that a tornado warning had been issued for the following counties. Their county was once again on the list. They were warned to please use caution and seek shelter if possible.

“I just wish they could tell us exactly where it was,” Eric said.

“Yeah,” she said.

“When we get to the Kramers, we’re going straight into the basement.”

“Yes sir,” she said, and when his eyes knifed over at her she said, “I’m joking, I’m joking, of course we’ll do it. It’s the only sane choice.”

They drove on in silence, though it did seem like he always got his way, Catherine thought.

–

After a turn onto a smaller back road, they passed a farm with its yellow signs warning drivers to slow down in case of farm animals crossing the road. The barns were sagging in the mud as if they were miserable in the rain and the white plaster of the farmhouse was splattered with dirt and large cragged arches had peeled off, revealing the encrusted lath beneath. The place made Catherine claustrophobic: the smallness of the life, medieval, tied to the land like that, and the muck, though the hills reminded her of Ireland: shorn clean by the mouths of cows and sheep so that each velvet crease and fold was visible, each boulder heaved to the surface, each flank and swale, just as it had been in the hills banked up against the dark stone mountains of the Burren, naked of trees and beribboned with blooms of purple heather where the flight of a bird was like a hand running over the expanse of the landscape, as though someone had shaped it with the swoop of the wind and the runnel of rain running through a chute in the rock.

She had the urge to run her hands across Eric’s body, over each contour of who he was so that he could become visible, known—as if he too had been heaved up from the ground below and revealed to the sky.

But he was hunched over the wheel, all ferocious concentration and probably mild annoyance. She sighed and he cocked his head in her direction but said nothing.

–

To clear the silence, Eric told her that one of the professors at school said that his wife got caught in that tornado in Springfield the week before. “She just pulled her car over on the side of the highway and crawled out into the ditch and waited for it to go over.”

“Do you think we should do that?”

“What? No,” he said. Why did she misunderstand everything and want to jump right to some conclusion? Abandon the plan? “I’m just saying that like, it’s pretty crazy, right?”

“Yeah, two tornadoes in a row.”

“No, I mean, that she went into the ditch.”

He was annoyed at her again, and all she was thinking was that that was exactly what they should do: get in the ditch and lie there and let the muddy rain water run down over their bodies. They could cling to each other while they got pelted and the trees lifted off the ground around them like some wild magic. It would be exciting. It would be just what they needed. The clinging.

–

Ahead of them on the road, lightning cracked down through the dark, followed immediately by the clash of thunder, whose whoompf shunted the car off to the side.

“God, that was close,” Eric said.

“It’s right over us,” Catherine. “Should we get in the ditch?”

“Yes? No? I don’t know, I really don’t. Let’s just, can we just, let’s just hold on for a second and see what happens.”

A bucket of water dumped across the windshield and then there was just the silent slinging of the wipers as they waited for the next smash of thunder.

“We never should have come into town today,” Eric said.

Catherine nodded, though she wasn’t sure she agreed anymore. They would have missed this, and even though they might die, it somehow seemed worth it, being out in all this wild weather. Who knew what could happen.

–

For a moment the rain eased, like they were in a pocket of calm.

“I was in a tornado once when I was a kid,” Eric said into the quiet. “On the West Coast. We were out in the street playing and then I looked up and like, all these branches were just suspended in the air up there. Like, just hanging. I didn’t know what it was, and thought I was learning some new rule of physics, you know. That like, sometimes branches would just hang out in the sky, lose gravity. I wondered, if at some point it would happen to me too. If I’d float up one day and just hang around in the sky for a while.”

“Aww,” she said. “I love that.”

Her tone was a little too cute and condescending and he couldn’t fully tell if she meant it, or if it just meant that he was once again, a cute safe guy. He regretted telling her, and thought that he should have saved it for someone else, some vague person in his future who could actually understand him.

“Anyhow, we ran inside and told my mom and she just held us tight in a doorway while the storm passed over. Our neighbors had their porch roof caved in and a couple up the street lost their R.V. We went up and looked at it. The thing was flattened. Like some giant had taken this massive club of a tree trunk and just lowered it into the R.V.”

“Damn,” she said, and this time he could tell she meant it.

–

Just then, lightning tore through the rain like a searchlight next to the driver side window.

“We need to get out of here,” Eric said.

“You don’t think we should go to the Kramers?”

“I do, I just.”

He didn’t say “just” what. He never said “just” what. That was the problem. He would just go off and do it.

“Let’s go to the college,” he said. “Their whole weight room, it’s underground.”

She wanted to ask why, but bit back the question. Maybe because it was across the border? Some invisible dividing line the tornado wouldn’t certainly adhere to?

“Sure,” she said, even though it didn’t make sense to her. Probably, it was the place he felt most safe, in control.

She thought of the grey rectangle of the Daycare where she worked for her mother with its red metal roof and its wide parking lot and the way it looked like it had just been lowered into place by a crane one day, just dropped, fwooomp! Right onto the countryside, more or less accidentally. Sometimes, as she approached it, she imagined a tornado winding down out of those hills and just tearing a metallic gash right through the middle of the structure. She’d grab up all the children and hold their small beating hearts close against her and carry them all away from the monotony of this pre-fab life.

–

Eric maneuvered around a crescent moon puddle that flooded most of the road as their phones buzzed: Flash flood warning, avoid roadways.

“How nice of them to tell us,” Eric said.

“Ha,” Catherine said. Service was terrible in the Berkshires, and she was surprised a message had gotten through at all.

Then, in a more somber tone, she said, “I hope nothing bad happens to anyone today.”

“Me too,” he said. A shared tenderness settled over the tension in the car like a fine mist.

It was clear how quickly everything could go wrong, like the spring before when the outer edge of hurricane Irene had dragged away the bridge near her house and replaced it with a raging mass of floodwater. The future seemed to teeter afterward, as though it were swaying on a creaky old rusted footing. Anything could go, wash away, and there she’d be on one side of the bridge and Eric on the other, and they’d have to decide: would they jump in and try to make it to each other, or would they look for another way across, or just call the whole thing off?

“Would you save me?” she asked, “if things got like, really bad?”

“Worse than this?”

She nodded.

“I mean, yeah, of course, I’ll always save you.”

He sounded more annoyed than anything.

–

She tried to climb back out of her thoughts and into the car where everything was still secure, their togetherness self-evident. She stared down at the gear shift, the center console, the radio with its green digital numbers, but it wasn’t enough.

“In Ireland, sometimes, I’d lie naked out in the rain,” she said.

“What? Really?”

“Yeah.” She was happy, telling this lie.

“Could people see you?”

“The neighbors, probably,” she said, casually.

“Huh,” he said, and then nothing else. What had emptied out of him earlier was now rushing back in, like a hot tumult.

What the fuck, she just used to lie around naked?

Catherine waited for him to ask something, anything else, but he didn’t. There was just this angry flex of his jaw.

“You failed the test,” she said finally. “You weren’t supposed to ask about other people, you were supposed to ask about me, about what it felt like, lying in the rain.”

“Jesus Christ, so you didn’t lie naked in the rain?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Fuck me.”

A wry victorious smile returned to her face and she folded her hands.

Still, it was a disappointment.

–

Behind them, lightning hit a tree and it exploded, caught fire, tugged at a power line and fell across the road.

“Holy fuck!” he said. He slammed on the brakes and turned to look at it through the rearview mirror.

“Why are you stopping, dummy?! The power lines could come down on us!”

“Don’t call me a dummy!”

“I’m not!”

“You just did!”

She put her hand to her mouth and to his shock, began to crack up laughing.

“What?!”

“Nothing, I just. Fuck. This is really funny. We’re going to die while calling each other dummies.”

“Who are you?”

Her eyes were glazed with tears and she was still holding her mouth.

“Who do you think?” she said, a little taken aback, suddenly, a little afraid.

“I don’t even fucking know, honestly. I really don’t. I really don’t think I fucking know.”

“What do you mean? You know me.” She was trying to convince him now, though she hadn’t been sure, right before.

“I don’t think I do.”

Something lurched, snapped, and creaked. The power line leaned outside the car as another tree tipped into the slack rope of its wires.

She reached for his thigh but pulled her hand back. Her eyes welled up with tears. After all, she had wanted him to know her, to love her. She had wanted to be bad and cynical and small and say wild and kind of fucked up things and she had wanted him to know they were more or less all true and untrue at the same time and she had wanted him to love her for it anyway and now he didn’t even know who she was.

“Can’t you just love me?” she said stupidly.

He sucked his cheeks in as the rain drummed on the roof. “I just, I just really don’t think I know who the fuck you are. I just don’t. Like, what are you?”

“I’m me,” she said, “me.” But suddenly it didn’t seem like enough for him to understand, like he could never clamber over into her mind to see the open proscenium of her consciousness with all the world projected up on the screen inside her.

“You know, fuck all this,” he said. “You’re right. We should get out of the fucking car.”

He opened the door, which slammed immediately shut as the rain-gusted wind hit it.

“Wait!” She said, and grabbed his arm. “Let’s go a little farther. Maybe it will be a little better up there.”

He hesitated. Who could really know. Already he was imagining the car lifting up, the windshield tilting skyward until they were hanging upside down in the air. At least then they’d know what was what. At least then, everything would be clear.

“No, fuck that,” he said, and ripped the door open.

He was going out into uncertainty. She couldn’t believe it.

He was immediately soaked. Just before letting the door go he leaned in with his hair dripping wet and said, “Hey, you coming or what?”

–

---

Matthew Zanoni Müller is a German-American writer of fiction and creative nonfiction and a community college professor. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals including BULL, Lost Balloon, the Southeast Review, The Boiler Journal, Hippocampus, and others. He lives in Western Massachusetts. To learn more about his writing, please visit: www.matthewzanonimuller.com or follow him on Twitter: @matthewzmuller.

© 2023, Matthew Zanoni Müller