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The Tempest After the tornado had
sucked up all the patio furniture, smashed all the windows and continued to
lay siege to the house for another hour and a half, Hannah began to get the
idea that it had something to prove. She started with the big
stuff, hoping it would be happy with the raw mass. Out went the recliner, across the porch and up a hundred feet
into the air. The couch was next,
dragged over piece by piece to the shattered sliding glass door, sucked
outside and up to heaven. Then the
lamps and the end tables, the piano and the television, and all the books,
the board games, and the video cassettes, until the living room was
absolutely bare, vacuumed clean by the great vortex swirling around her. But it was still hungry, she could
tell. They were beginning to develop
a dialogue. It wanted something
valuable. She went downstairs and
grabbed all of her CD’s, feeding them out the little basement window, one by
one. Jazz, rock, classical; it didn’t
discriminate. They all flew just as
fast. In the back of the upstairs
hall closet she found her mother’s old jewelry box. The storm took it all as she tossed it to the window; silver,
then gold. By this time, she figured,
she was up to about fifteen, twenty thousand dollars easy, and nothing. The wind still blew and whistled and
whined through the kitchen and the halls, begging for more. The cat meowed in the corner, so she
tossed him out, too, but it didn’t help. She walked through her
empty kitchen into her empty living room.
She sat down in the corner where the piano used to be and she
cried. She cried from exhaustion and
pain. Mostly, though, she cried from
loneliness. Then, rather suddenly,
she stood up and walked to the door, wiping the tears away with the sleeve of
her shirt. “What is it that you are
looking for here?” she asked calmly.
“You want my roof? Take
it. There’s a car in the garage, and
you can take that, too. That’s about
it. I don’t have anything else. You want me? It’s OK. Take me.” She let go of the frame she
had been bracing herself against.
“Take me.” And the storm did
take her. It took her back inside and
down the hall and deposited her in the bedroom. Then it spoke to her. Seraphim, no, sanitize, not that either, salad
rice. It was saying something, but she couldn’t make it out. Then she got it, she knew what it wanted, sacrifice. She ran to the closet that
her husband kept all of his clothes in, the one she hadn’t opened since he
died. The first thing she saw was his
tie rack. No sooner was it in her
hands then the tornado ripped it away, up and out the window. Every item gave it more satisfaction, and
it blew faster and faster. The shirts
he wore to work, his baseball caps, the sweatpants he laid around the house in
after his radiation therapy. She ran
around the house grabbing pictures of them on vacation, hiking, wedding
photos, the big bowl with his name on it, his shoes in the hall closet. She threw it all out the window and
everything was gone, everything, but the wind still blew. She stood at the window and looked out at
the sky, exploding with ravenous want. A glint of silver caught he
finger and she whipped her wedding ring off.
It went up a million miles, past the clouds and the moon and up into
space so fast she could hear it screaming as it passed mercury and exploded
into the late afternoon sun. |
