to retreat back into our basement. The old man rushed across the yard to me and rolled Mikey back onto my legs. His frail arms pulled my own up, as he shouted at me, dragging my knees against the ground. I stood up with my right foot, and pulled the other out from under Mikey, who was staring at the last droplet of orange light above.
I had a second to look Dad in the eye, one last time. I suppose I should be grateful for that, some people don’t even get that final glance. Just like when Not-Mikey disappeared off the street, my body was yanked off the earth by its puppet-strings. My father darted off below me, also caught in the tornado, while his house exploded into splintered fragments. The roof twisted off like a bottle cap, before spliting down the middle into two, seperate chunks.
As quickly as I was flung backwards, my course changed to the right. My appendages fluttered around me, they followed my body, but were commanded by the storm. It felt like the G simulator on steroids. I sailed higher and higher, I think. I couldn’t keep my eyes open after the first turn. The wind was trying to tear my eyelids off, and all I could do was revert back to my G-force training. One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three.
...
When I woke up, there was a blue sky over my head. I must have been out in that cornfield for a long while, because when I tried to move,
the black stuff that had dried and caked into my skin tore off painfully. I remember sitting there for a while with my broken ribs, moaning sorry noises for myself, staring out at waves of flattened, blackened corn. I tried to stand. A bone in my left leg was broken from the fall. I must’ve landed on it, and thankfully it wasn’t sticking out of me.
The farmland I had landed in was swamp-like from all the moisture and sludge, and yet it was cold with morning air. It was probably six or
seven when I returned to the land of the living, and it was a hard time to be alive. I could see smoke in the distance, in a direction away from the matted crop and early sun, so I began to crawl that way.
With every foot I put between myself and my crater, a subtle ache in the membrane between my skull and brain grew less and less subtle. I
could only imagine my death, there in that heartless bog, arriving when the sun would inevitably rise over the corn stalks to bake me alive.
What glee then, what pure joy you must believe I felt, when I saw the edge of a dirt road through the legs and trunks of corn. I could even feel my eyes widen with relief. There was still the painful matter of dragging myself through the last few feet of crop, but it was there. The end was right there. I think I passed out again when I touched the gravel though.
Half-hanging in and out of the road, it probably looked like a virgin serial killer had left me there, half-murdered. But somehow someone managed to find me. He was old, and he smacked my face a little too hard when he tried to wake me up, but there he was, standing over me like my guardian angel, and a blue truck behind him with some kind of lift-kit on it.
I remember the lift-kit because it was fucking hard to get into his truckbed. The phrase “extremely painful” describes it inadequately, and
that was before the ride back to his house. I’d tell you what he said, if I could remember any of it. Apparently I was still concussed enough to drift in and out of consciousness. He had a house, a tall house, but I never made it inside, because when we stopped in his driveway, I asked him a favor.
“Can you... can you... take me to Sedalia?” I asked, out of breath from intense thinking. He just mumbled something at me, then he tried to say it louder.
“Sedalia,” I repeated. “Take me...” And then, the flustered old man got back in his truck and drove me there.
...
By the time we got to Sedalia, which probably took less time than it felt like, my mind had cleared up. Lips were awful chapped, and my leg
was still in critical condition, but at least I could start to think straight. Unlike the day before, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but the storm had blown lots of corn over.
I should’ve known by the smoke. Highway 72 took us all the way into it, what was left of Sedalia. The buildings, the street, the grass, everything was on fire. It was an inferno, but I didn’t feel it until the hot, dry wind hit the back of my neck.
Around the front of the disaster, there were a pair of firetrucks hosing into the blaze. Behind one of the fire-engines, a white Red Cross tent stood, and a news van was around too. The old man pulled in next to the shelter and came back around to help me out, saying while he walked:
“It’s been burning since last night, like I told ya. Are you from here?”
“But... but why? What the hell is going on?” I said without answering him. Truth is, if he had asked me his same question a week ago, I’d have been just as dismissive.
“Beats me.” A long pause stayed between us, as we stood there watching Sedalia’s bricks and mortar turn to ash and slag. The old man wandered off, mumbling about my leg, while I sat in the truck bed watching the flames crackle and flip.
A nurse came back with him, she said something to me, but I couldn’t break gaze with the fire. Then she moved my broken leg, which I couldn’t ignore.
“Are you alright, sir?”
“No... I think so.” I said, over my breath.
“This gentleman told me that your leg is broken, what happened?” She asked, cutting my jean pant-leg off at the hip with a small exacto knife.
“There was a storm, it...” I had to put my hands to my face. “It sucked me up.”
“Wait!” My outburst startled them both. “Where is everybody? My parents, are alive right?” The old man turned around, and the nurse broke
eye contact with me.
“We’ve only seen a handful of patients, we only just arrived on the scene, and the firetrucks got here about an hour ago.” There was nothing else to say. They were dead.
I was there when the helicopters dropped some kind of chemical agent on the fire, which is what it took to finally stifle it. It was late into the afternoon by then, and only fire fighters were allowed in to the wreckage. I was later told by a fire-chief-looking guy that he thought it was a massive oil fire, since there was crude residue everywhere, and that they had found two, split-open, heavy-duty tanker trucks in a field nearby.
That’s what I was covered in. Oil. They scrubbed it off me and I was silent while they worked. The fighters took in body-bags, and I was silent. They asked me if I could identify bodies, bodies that looked more like silhouettes than corpses, and I was silent.
Eventually more news vans showed up. I heard reporter after reporter framing the story, calling it a national tragedy. The storm had kept people in their basements, while the oil dripped in through the cracks. When the storm eased up, something had lit the oil, probably a pilot light, or running vehicle. And just like that, the town went up like a match. That’s what they said, while I was silent.
When it was over, I asked the farmer to borrow his phone, but he offered to take me to the hospital himself. Besides being so stiff, he really was a kind old man. I’m lucky he found me in that field, but I lied to him and said that I had friends back in the city and a special doctor I liked back there. So he drove me back to my apartment instead.
...
Before I found you, I had to pay a cab to take me here. The driver was real talkative, and even helped get me comfortably situated in the
backseat. We talked the whole way here about some bogus story I made up about how I “busted myself bloody well” as he put it. I think he might
have been Irish.
I told him when he asked that I had been in a single-car accident, but that I had kept the whole thing quiet, explaining my lack of cast or crutches. He asked me why I was hiding it, and I told him that I was embarrassed. I might have told him a little bit too confidently though, since by the time he dropped me off here he sounded fed up with my hypocritical nonsense. Before he left me though, he called through the bent window and said:
&n
bsp; “Instead of wettin’ your willy, why don’t you get your leg fixed!?”
“Don’t worry,” I yelled back to him “Once I’m finished here I will.”
That bouncer, Damien, seemed apprehensive when I came up to him. He was probably right to feel that way, could’ve been worried that I might
literally die on the property if he let me in. Also, now that I think about it, coming into a strip-club with a baseball bat as a cane probably gave the wrong impression. But once I showed him the card you gave me, he led me straight in. Specifically, straight to you.
“So in short, that’s how the lumberjack convention went.”
Epilogue
“I’m not grieving though. I don’t feel like grieving, but I certainly don’t feel happy about it. What is wrong with me?”
“Hun, look,” She said to me, her eyes unsure of her answer.
“I never graduated from high school or college, so I don’t know any psychology.” That’s where Lucy ended it, as if her incompetence would comfort me. In a back room of the strip-club, we sat in velvet red chairs that were big and lavish. Her hair wasn’t soft anymore, it was straight and flat instead.
“40 some people are dead. A whole town who three days ago I was hoping would all disappear from my life entirely. People I wish I could erase from my memory! People I loathed! They were all burned alive!” I became hysterical, my voice shaking with every syllable.
“So what does that make me?