Twister Weather
It all begins in a cumulus cloud. Warm, moist air smashing into cool, dusty air. Like two angry fists banging together, each one breaking the other one’s knuckles. Instability within the atmosphere springs to life. Winds start to shift their direction, speeding up now, no longer just blowing, but spinning and tilting, tilting and spinning, transforming into steady, powerful updrafts. In Euclidean terms, it’s known as the “area of rotation.” The clouds bruise various shades of purple and green, like late autumn apples turning bad on the limb. And then…the wind will die down. The air will grow still. Yet there’s no doubt anymore. You just have to look into the sky, to see for yourself. A disaster is coming…
It begins this time with the thermostat on the wall. The thermostat that’s supposed to read 68. Not a single degree higher or lower no matter what the weather. But there are three other people in the house, three other people who aren’t my father, and sometimes we simply forget. Sometimes, someone changes the temperature. My father glances at the thermostat as he passes. He stares at the dial. He freezes. After that, his head swings as if it’s a ball on a tether, whipping back and forth in the room. His body is rigged, his muscles are triggered. There are three of us in the room, plus my father, and even though he’s still at that moment, there’s no doubt anymore. A disaster is coming.
From the clouds, a rotating column of air, or funnel, starts to plunge toward the earth. These clouds are considered a super-cell formation. Warm air flanking around the back of the cyclone gives the funnel its power, breathing it to life. Everything to create the event has fallen correctly into place. Now, everything on the surface is in the path of destruction. Most last no longer than ten minutes, but some can go on for a well over an hour. Once a funnel makes its way to the Earth there’s no mistaking the obvious. A tornado’s been born.
It didn’t have to be the thermostat. Anything at all might set my dad off, and part of the trick is to watch out for these things, to see beyond what was happening now and into the future, to see what might bring about trouble. Was that a new stain on the carpet, or had it always been there? Did the lampshade always bend toward the left, or did it used to bend to the right? Were potatoes a good side dish for fried chicken, or should we have stuffing instead? And if so, which flavor? So intent at all times to search for such details, the thermostat went completely unnoticed. A thermostat off by a single degree. And that’s all it takes. His wife, his children, we glance at each other, no need to say what we already know. This man in our house isn’t a man anymore. For the next several minutes he’s a brute force of nature, and we, his family, are in the path of destruction.
Tornados are said to sound like a freight train, like wheels screeching and grinding against the tracks of a railroad. But they can also sound like large waterfalls or great whooshing’s of air. Sometimes they sound like distant jet engines. No matter the sound, one thing is the same; the noise always gains in momentum, a growing wall of audible frenzy. Tornado sirens, originally designed to warn of air raids during WWII, shriek out in alert. Hearing loss can occur at just 85 decibels. The sirens can reach levels of 135 decibels. Combined with the roar of an approaching tornado, the overall clamor can literally be deafening.
“Who messed with this?! Huh?! Which one of you fuckers messed with the settings? Answer me!”
In appearance he still resembled a person; there’s eyes, there’s limbs, there’s a torso and a head. Everything essential to pass as a human. But there’s nothing identifiably human in his voice anymore, nothing suggesting this man is a father, a husband, a provider. Not content with simply screaming or shouting, he draws in his breath and belches his outrage, as if the anger within makes him ill to his stomach.
“How many God damned times do I have to tell you not to mess with this shit?! Nobody touches the controls! You all want to get a fucking job and pay the bill the electricity bill or pay for any fucking thing?!”
One insult, then another, stacking in layers on top of another. He gags on his disgust, of who we were as a family. We brace ourselves against the force of his insults, or at least we attempt to. After all, we’ve heard this, felt this, so many times in our lives, for so many years.
“I don’t ask anyone for one fucking thing in this family! And you sure as shit don’t offer! Not one of you lifts a God damn finger around here unless I ask them to! Useless, fucking lazy people! Ungrateful, useless, lazy fucking people!”
His words wear at us as we try to take cover. His words break us down like water rushing through bedrock, eroding away at us slowly, unending, until we’ve been washed away into nothing.
Tornadoes can appear from any direction, though most tend to move from southeast to northeast. The deadliest tornado on record, in Bangladesh, ripped through three “upazilas” (or “counties”) spanning an area of 58 miles. Every home within four miles of the tornado’s path was demolished. Trees were either uprooted completely or stripped of their bark, transformed into bent, broken skeletons. Thirteen hundred people were killed, 12 thousand people were injured, and over 80 thousand found themselves homeless. Those who survived to watch the tornado gut and then travel out of their cities were horrified to watch as it slowed, seemed to hold still…and then barreled toward them again. Because sometimes tornadoes can do that, can backtrack mid-path, returning to the area they just left in ruins, inflicting a second dose of destruction. And all you can do is attempt to take cover, try to stay safe in what remains of the ruins…
Since the thermostat is on the living room wall, the living room is where he begins.
“God damn mess! Look at this God damn mess!” He flips the cushions off the sofa, observing stray bits of crumbs resting inside of the couch frame. We’re sloppy, ungrateful. That’s what the crumbs whisper. He stomps his way from living room to kitchen, throwing open cupboards and cabinets. Dishes exploded when they’re slammed on the floor. Silverware scatters when it was tossed across counters.
“Do any of you know how to clean a plate?! Or a glass?! Should I just throw all this shit away since you can’t fucking keep it clean?!” In his eyes the kitchen is the domain of our mother, so she receives the blunt of this onslaught.
“I do keep it clean!” she protests. “I keep it clean every day! But you can’t expect it to be perfect all the time…” Except he can, because he does. He examines fingerprints on a glass. “I wouldn’t piss in this glass, that’s how fucking filthy it is!” It detonates in the sink. “God damn it! How the fuck can you live like this?! Don’t you have any respect?! Any at all?!”
My brother and I run to our bedroom. He’s assaulted the living room, he’s destroying the kitchen. After that, he’ll rush into our bedroom. Arms shaking, we remake our beds. We straighten our shoes and put them away. We open our closet, adjusting every shirt on its hanger. Any stray scrap of paper and small bit clutter, anything that might appear out of order. We work to remove anything that might be trouble, that might add fuel to the fire consuming our father. I glance at my brother. He glances at me.
Quicker, we think at each other. We have to move quicker. We can hear our father, getting closer and closer. We can tell by the way cupboards are slamming, by the way his voice ricochets off the walls…he’s coming, he’s coming.
Even before he throws open our door we know that it’s hopeless. Before he sets a foot in our bedroom my brother and I know that we’ve failed. True, our shirts are on hangers, but they’re not on correctly. There’s a scuff on the wall from our shoes. There’s an empty pop can on the sill of our window. My brother and I glance at each other. How? How did we miss this?
“Ungrateful!,” our father shouts. “What a pair of ungrateful slobs!” He rips our shirts from their hangers, throws our shoes in the air, pulls our beds from the wall to hunt for more garbage.
Quiet. We try to be quiet. Sweat drips from our father’s forehead, the stench of it invading the tiny space of our bedroom. I try not to breathe it, this scent of a madman, eager to move someplace where the air isn’t so deadly. But we keep our heads down, not moving, not speaking, watching our bedroom getting torn into pieces.
Content he’s put his sons in their place, he blows out of our room and back to the kitchen. He’s raging again, screaming about the plates he’d destroyed, livid that, in the time between coming into our bedroom and back to the kitchen, our mother hasn’t cleaned them up from the floor.
It’s not entirely understood how tornadoes die out. Possibly, when they travel over colder parts of the earth or when the clouds they’re born from lose their integrity, the tornadoes collapse in on themselves and expire. Another storm moving in, pushing the original out, is also considered a fair explanation. Since their initial formation remains partially mysterious, their eventual dissolution is likewise uncertain. Brutal at once, then suddenly over, with nothing left to see in the sky but streaks of clouds moving over a scorched, pummeled earth, disappearing into the horizon…
One final scream…one final insult…and as fast as it started, it’s over. As if the batteries powering his fury have run down, he slumps into the couch. He turns on the tv. No explanations, no questions asked. Our home finally silent, we straighten and clean and put back together everything that’s in shambles around us. And he watches us do so, sitting still on the couch, as if everything that’s happened hasn’t happened at all, as if the chaos he’s bred was only ever a dream, something that happened a long time ago to some other family he’d once heard about. And carefully, we watch him right back, observing, evaluating, hoping, for now, it really is over. Quietly…quickly…we put our world back together. And we watch and we wait, always expectant, always uncertain, keeping our eyes toward an uncertain horizon.