I awake sitting upright, alarmed, disoriented, pulse pounding, ears ringing like I just got slapped in the head by an irrational father. Yes, I do know what that's like, that's not the point. Something is wrong. Horribly wrong. Catastrophically. Wrong.
I strain my eyes to get my bearings in the darkness, try to listen through the ringing and pressure in my ears, to make sense of the surreal clattering, like a bucket of marbles spilling out onto a table, a scoop of driveway gravel being poured into the bed of my father’s blue pickup truck. Cold spray hits my face, stinging hard, a bullying older brother with a garden hose.
I turn my face away from the spray and two bright blue-white lines swim into view, shimmering in the darkness, tilting this way and that, squirming, not quite parallel, shrouded in heat distortion and smoke, too bright to focus on. The vertical, slit pupils of a demon Cheshire cat, surreal and menacing, too tall, too close together.
Cat. My cat. My cat Snowball. My parents let me name her. Or maybe when she was a kitten and I was three and I said she looked like a little snowball, they decided that would be as good a name for her as any. Snowball, with the gray smudge on the top of her head that turned out to be fur color, not a grease spot that could be scrubbed off an angry kitten’s head with some dish soap and a wet washcloth. Snowball who sleeps on my legs when it’s cold. But it’s cold now, and she’s not here.
The menacing, shimmering lines dim slightly, fading toward yellow.
She’s an adult cat now, but still young. I’m not yet ten, and I’m sitting up in my bed, pulse still pounding in my chest, in my throat, breath coming hard, ears ringing, eyes straining to see.
The lines dim toward orange.
It’s my youth bed, the one with its wagon-wheel headboard like my younger brother’s across the room. The ones handed down from our older brothers when they moved into their army bunks and we moved out of our cribs in the tiny dark room tucked in beside the stairs. This bed is under a window that’s propped open to vent out the summer heat. Except it’s cold and pouring rain and hail and the wind is blowing it in through the window and my bed is soaking wet.
The lines dim toward red.
The other window. That’s where the other window is, between my bed and my brother’s. The lines are outside that window.
For one blinding instant, it’s full daylight. The lightning reveals the yellow brick of the church next door, two dark lines where the bright lines were in the darkness as if a flash of negative on a spooky cartoon show. And then it’s dark again and the glowing lines are dimming out into the darkness.
As the thunder comes with a chest-kicking boom, I put it together. The parallel lightning rods, thick braided cables that come down from the chimney above the church’s boiler, down the back of the building into our back yard. It’s so black because the power is out, the Standard station kitty-corner across the street unusually dark, no ambient light thrown from the Jim Dandy drive-in canopy or the illuminated menu boards at the drive-in spaces where the teenagers hang out after dark, their burgers and pops a thinly-veiled excuse to hang out with their peers, to scrounge desperately for teenage love, to make out furtively in the shadows of the back seats. If they’re out tonight they’re taking shelter in their cars, ragtops pulled shut and rolled-up windows fogging. Or maybe they’re at home
safe from the storm—as safe as anyone can be in this flat country, where the tornadoes can smash a brick house just like a garden shed. But I can’t see the Jim Dandy from here, and no cars are lit up driving under the blacked-out stoplight. I turn in my sopping sheets and rise up onto my knees, for leverage to push up the bottom slider of the window, or to try, wriggling it side to side until I get it to move enough that the prop comes loose, and I can toss it to the floor in the dark behind me and slide-catch-slide the window shut without closing it on my fingers like my little brother did once. The hail clatters against the glass in defiance.
Swimming in the darkness I stagger to the other window, above the wet toybox and the sopping carpet, and I do the same as with mine, wriggling it upward enough to loosen the sawed broom handle that props it open, and halt the sticky window closed against the storm. My brother, breathing in the darkness beside me, somehow never stirs.
The room quieter now, except for the rain and the occasional hailstone hitting the window, I feel my way back to my bed beneath the window. The entire bed is sopping wet. I pull my pillow and the wool blanket off onto the relatively dry floor, wrap myself in the cool scratchy wool and find a relatively comfortable position as I wait for the wool to start holding my body heat. Sleep comes more quickly than I would expect, given the panic into which I just woke up.
At some point, I think I have a dim memory of my mother coming into the room to check on us. Or maybe it’s a dream because it’s like I’m seeing her from my bed, not the floor. But in the morning, as the summer sunrise shouts in through my window and I wake stiff from lying curled on the floor, I realize that my still-damp wool blanket is covered under the spare blanket from the hall closet. It wasn’t a dream.
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