Writing

Misty

Misty says: "Do you want to know what it's like to be inside a hurricane? I'll tell you, but it won't mean a thing. You won't understand the sounds, even if I tell you they are like this or like that, and the this and the that are sounds you've heard every day of your life. You won't understand how stupid every stupid thing is that you care about until you are nose-to-floor in the basement, praying even though you're not used to it, and maybe feeling a fool for throwing in the towel at the last minute.

"When I followed Bud down to the basement I thought I would not hear or see anything but a lot of wind and grayness. I thought I would just wait, and maybe in a while it would be ok, and then I'd get up and go about my business.

"But when Frank decided to show us who was boss, when the storm took over my story and owned it, I saw a whole other world forming. It was like evolution in that basement. I went from scales to feathers. We waited, everyone, hovering behind the curtains until the storm turned some distant corner and then we all collapsed with joy that it was gone, the unwelcome houseguest that took over our world, that rearranged the oceans of our globes, that made an unknown wound visible in all of us.

"For one, I finally, finally saw that the love I had for your father had just dried up and blown away.

"I hadn't done anything to stop or start it. I hadn't worked hard in either direction. But I am not one to figure things out quickly. I did have two children with the man. Though both of you are fully grown, Seth is less finished than I would like. I don't know about you. After you left five years ago, we didn't mention you much. But words and thoughts are too different to ever stand for each other. I try to think in pictures. I have the picture of you with me all the time.

"The storm: I wish I could say something really simple about what happened so that wherever you were when the hurricane hit you could understand what it was like for me. We went into the basement. We saw and heard and felt darkness and screams of the trees and all the sad lives that were blown into nothing so quickly. I was willing to wait down there for however long it took. The monster horses, the monster frying pans, and the monster cats all beat the earth with their collective hooves, bottoms, paws. It went on for a long time.

"Imagine that there is something after you. It's after everyone. Imagine that it is the inevitable conclusion to your existence, and it has physically manifested itself in the form of an oversized rainstorm, something you've lived through, on a much smaller scale, a million times. Imagine that this common thing, bloated, is as terrifying as any other common thing bloated: a huge washing machine, a monstrous grandmother, all the guilt of your life sucked into one gigantic guilt ball. Whatever you want to imagine as the most horrifying thing, it's coming after you and it's not a dream and everything you own and many people you know are in its path.

"Powerless. No. Wait. It's worse. You feel powerless and forgotten already.

"I am not easier to scare than most people. Plus I know that being on the outside of a crisis is often a lot harder than being on the inside of one. But to understand the storm you just have to be there, not just then but before and after, because the story of the storm is what you were doing before the storm that got interrupted. It's what happened afterwards, too. The entire experience is the experience. This is why I could never read the newspaper, all those events removed from their befores and afters were just little, two-dimensional chunks of nothing.

"OK, I'll try again.

"The skeleton of the earth shook, and the horrible palsy crawled up through the basement floor into my bones, and then seemed to pass through me and into the house here in Opel, or, more rightly, into the basement walls, for I knew nothing of the house above. Though these tremors passed from the earth to me, through to the structure that surrounded and maybe protected me, I really don't know if Bud felt them at all, if he felt his very eyes jiggling in his sockets, if he understood what it was like to be terrified but at the same time humbled before something that one could do nothing about.

"And though I was afraid of the howling outside, and of losing the house and the gas station and you kids, somewhere out in the world, at that moment I was most afraid of this: that Bud didn't understand anything about how close he was to death every minute, that he didn't get this easy, easy truth.

"As the walls seemed to buckle and heave, and the evil branches swirled and smashed into the windows upstairs, and the house above us shouted and was leveled, if I survived this storm I vowed to figure out where you had gone and why I was left with just this witless husband.

"So, obviously, I made it. How about you?"