“It is a spring evening and I am twelve. The thunderhead is moving in. My family watches from the back porch. The cloudmass spins. My dad says we should go inside, yet none of us move. It descends: a whirlpool. A massive funnel cloud. Black and blue and glimmering. It is terrifying and it is beautiful and it is gone past us before the next blink." |
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I. It is nine thirty in the morning and I am hiding in my bathtub.
II. The National Weather Service was created on February 9, 1870, to record and archive weather patterns and data across the United States. A. Exactly one hundred and twenty-nine years later, I was born in a hospital on the outskirts of Chicago, Illinois, on the edge of tornado alley. Six months later, my family returned to Missouri, the alley’s thicket. B. The National Weather Service’s purpose now focuses on providing “weather, water and climate data, forecasts, warnings, and impact-based decision support services for the protection of life and property and enhancement of the national economy.” |
Photo by Caseen Kyle Registos
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III. Tornado (noun): originally taken from Spanish tronada [thunderstorm].
A. Its first usage is by sailors and navigators on the tropical Atlantic seas in the late sixteenth century. It describes massive thunderstorms with sudden and violent gusts of wind. Only in the middle of the nineteenth century do English-speaking colonizers apply the term to the swirling tumults of the American Midwest.
IV. I can’t not write about the spiral.
A. I am twenty-one and hungover. I am painting a watercolor of a lioness for a comic about storms and girls. The caption reads: one million trains.
i. This is the sound of a tornado ripping through the atmosphere. The wind grows so loud it sounds like a million train whistles blowing air churning headed straight toward you. If you are outside watching the incoming vortex and it isn’t moving across the horizon you must shelter. It is moving toward you.
V. Tornado (noun): taken also from Spanish tornar [to turn, return].
A. Perhaps an attempt to further specify the translation. Perhaps an attempt to differentiate the tornado from other fierce weather patterns. Perhaps an indication of the need to describe the whirling, the turning, the long-stretching funnel like a straw to the gods.
VI. It is a spring evening and I am twelve. The thunderhead is moving in. My family watches from the back porch. The cloudmass spins. My dad says we should go inside, yet none of us move. It descends: a whirlpool. A massive funnel cloud. Black and blue and glimmering. It is terrifying and it is beautiful and it is gone past us before the next blink.
A. I am reminded now of a hot tub in Florida on a vacation when I am still wearing one-piece swimsuits. A girl I met and I swim like koi fish in a round pond, and the water whirls between us into a beautiful spinning maelstrom.
B. I am reminded now of the windstorm off the Gulf Coast; standing on the condo balcony, wind ripping off the sea, blowing the tears from our eyes straight into the glass window. The building groans but the sky is clear, no waterspout in sight.
C. I am reminded now of bathing with my sister in our shared porcelain bathtub, coloring the slick walls with bathtub markers, pouring buckets of now-cold water onto each other’s heads, and watching the water drain slowly, emptying the tub, in impossibly small whirlpools.
VII. The creation of the National Weather Service can be credited to a tornado in what is now Chicago, Illinois, 1855. Over the course of an hour, a tornado ripped at homes, toppled barns, and claimed the lives of at least four people. There were no sirens, no mass warning, no hospitals to be born in; only farmers on porches or in beds with cotton linens, children in yards or living rooms on handmade rugs, babies on laps or in wooden cradles, listening to the storm rage. This is one of the earliest reported-on tornadoes in the country.
VIII. The National Weather Service banned public tornado alerts until 1952 to avoid public panic.
IX. On a website called The Tornado Project (copyright 2015), the authors list the Top Ten U.S. Killer Tornadoes. All except one occurred before 1950. Number seven, however, is Joplin, Missouri, May 22, 2011, when a rated EF5 tornado ripped through the city.
A. I have watched the CCTV footage from inside the hospital. The wind seam rips the building apart. I watched the parked cars shake, shudder, be dragged across the asphalt lot. I watched cushions ripped from chairs, ceiling panels shredded, lightbulbs shattered. The cameras don’t have microphones, so I can’t hear the walls being wrenched apart by two hundred and fifty miles per hour winds.
X. My studio apartment that I move into twelve years after May 22, 2011, is in Springfield, Missouri, forty-five minutes northeast of Joplin. Both cities lie on the “I-44 Corridor,” a section of Interstate-44 that stretches across the country’s tornado alley, tracing historic Route 66. My apartment is two minutes south of the highway. I can hear the semi-trucks and police sirens at night. And sometimes, I can hear the whistle of a train.
A. I am reminded now of the wet wind whipping the spit from my mouth as I open it to speak. Storms predicted all evening but Kayla and I still walk to the campus gym. Two months before the bathtub. Gray blue black the sky becomes. We spend an hour sheltering in the women’s locker room after the sirens go off, sitting against the lockers, listening to the girls chatting and toilets flushing and thunder rumbling and the radios on the trainers’ belts crackling with static.
XI. The Enhanced Fujita Scale (EF-Scale) is used to measure tornado intensity, based on the severity of damage a tornado causes. Replacing the traditional Fujita Scale in 2007, the EF-Scale retains the same basic design by rating tornadoes in six intensity categories from zero (light damage) to five (incredible damage). The rating is determined based on wind speed and the costs of resulting property damage.
A. An EF5-ranked tornado typically lasts several minutes. In some cases, like Joplin, Missouri, it can last exactly thirty-eight.
B. An EF5-ranked tornado can vary in size. In some cases, like Joplin, Missouri, it can be over a mile wide.
C. An EF5-ranked tornado may not necessarily result in mass casualties. In some cases, like Joplin, Missouri, it did.
XII. Property damage, unlike human fatalities, allows for a reasonable gauge of certainty. We know ninety-mile-per-hour winds can and will cause windows to shatter. We know one hundred-mile-per-hour winds can and will cause roof shingles to detach and take flight. We know two hundred mile per hour winds can and will uproot trees older than asphalt, will suck homes and vehicles into the air.
XIII. In some cases, like Joplin, Missouri, an EF-5 tornado will raze a town.
A. The damage amounted to over two billion dollars then. Adjusted for inflation, that is approximately four billion dollars now. The insurance payout was the highest in Missouri history.
I. It is nine thirty in the morning and I am hiding in my bathtub. The sirens are a scream that merges with the hoarser squall of the wind, something primordial, shaking the frame of my apartment’s singular window. A million trains. Autumn calls me as my power goes out and asks if I’m safe. I lie in fetal position with my cheek against the porcelain and I say I don’t know. She’s only three miles east of me at Menards, where the storm has already passed. I listen to her work the cash register and I feel the urge to pray.
A. I was raised Catholic. I no longer practice.
i. The storm is on top of me.
XIV. If you do not have a storm cellar, or a basement, or a ditch off the side of the road, the best place to shelter during a tornado is a bathtub. They are sturdy, are often located in a central room of the house, and can fit a human body. It is recommended to cover yourself with pillows or a mattress, in case of debris.
A. Usually, the storms come at night. I crack my apartment’s solitary window before bed so the siren’s whine will wake me.
XV. One hundred fifty-eight people lost their lives on May 22, 2011. One thousand one hundred fifty people were injured.
A. The storm was so sudden that many had no time to find shelter.
B. Imagine the sky darkening like spilled ink mixed with mud over a high school graduation party. The smell of char fills the air from backyard grills and pool parties. There is joy here: parents and children and friends and lovers and siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles and coworkers and acquaintances and neighbors from down the street; everyone outside, the air thick and encompassing. The youngest children shout as they play, jump into pools. Pop songs play on the radio, loud and tinny.
C. As the sky bruises, the wind picks up, blowing spit and paper plates and colorful napkins into the air like backward confetti. Adults watch the sky, children play in the spaces between the earliest raindrops. The locusts and moths and gnats disappear and the crows and cardinals and bluebirds take flight, calling to each other before going silent.
D. Then, the downpour: rain thick in sheets, rain heavy like blood, pounding against the pavement, chasing the parents and children inside homes or under carports. Maybe some turned on the news broadcast and followed their instructions, herding children and pets and precious items into basements or cellars or central rooms. Some don’t. The hail starts: tennis-ball-sized. It dents the roofs of vehicles and carves a path for the incoming destruction. Through it, the sirens scream, though some survivors say they went off and then went silent and then went off and then went silent and then went off and then went swallowed by sound.
E. Then, the sound of trains. Through the pounding rain and hail, the parents and children hear the whirling, the screaming, the wind blowing a hundred miles per hour. The rain falls sideways.
F. Then, the funnel. Rain-wrapped, invisible, eating power lines that explode into surges like green fireworks against the black. Eating bricks from flowerbeds and branches from trees. It pulls roofs and walls asunder. It pulls anyone exposed toward the ocean of wind, the finger of god, consuming all.
G. It rendered them unrecognizable: the parents and children and friends and lovers and siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles and coworkers and acquaintances and neighbors down the street. A person can only take so much force before splitting, before the features are ripped from their faces: eyes from sockets, lips from jaws, fingers from hands, legs from torso. To become parts. To be yanked into the air. To crush a skull. To eviscerate, to disembowel. To scream a throat raw for no sound to be heard. To watch another struggle to hold on, fail, and fly away.
H. To know that joy was here just minutes before.
I. What is the economy for a human body.
IV. I can’t not write about the spiral.
A. The way a tornado forms is still a theory, because humans can't gather data by entering the funnel. We think, thanks to the work of meteorologists and storm chasers, that most form when the mesocyclone of a supercell thunderstorm is dragged downward by increasing rainfall. The cool air of the downdraft mixes with the warm air of the updraft. The slurry of birth.
B. New data reveals that the country’s Tornado Alley patterns have shifted. By analyzing patterns of tornado births over the last seventy years, meteorologists state the hot spot for tornado formation, places that almost guarantee tornado life, has shifted from central Illinois, Iowa, eastern Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas to southern Illinois, western Tennessee and Kentucky, northern Mississippi and Alabama, and the boot heel of Missouri.
XVI. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which houses the National Weather Service, had over one thousand employees fired in February 2025. Three hundred and seventy-five of these employees worked for the National Weather Service.
A. Various journalists have speculated that these firings were meant to lay the groundwork for privatizing these agencies. Many lobbyists and constituents have ties to private weather-tracking companies that would benefit from that privatization.
XVII. Would the sirens scream of danger if they are not publicly funded. Would I need to subscribe to know when the condensation funnel cloud first touches the ground.
XVIII. When the horizon darkens, I listen for the deadquiet. It comes before the downpour; the cicadas go silent and the finches take cover. They know when the first lightning will strike. I watch the leaves on the trees turn inside out and taste the humidity on my tongue. The sky becomes muddy, hazy, purple and green like the dregs of a cauldron. Then, the rain comes down in sheets.
XIX. Ask myself is it moving toward me. Wonder if I filled and drained the tub would the water dance in spirals of its own creation. Find in myself a love, deep and ancient, stirred only by the gale that rips hundred-year-old trees up root by root.
I. It is nine thirty in the morning and I am hiding in my bathtub. I text my girlfriend “pray for me.” I feel the wall shudder under the force of the wind and wonder if the trees that shade my window from the sun will bear it, wonder if the mourning doves and the crows that roost among the branches will survive and come back and rebuild.
A. Its first usage is by sailors and navigators on the tropical Atlantic seas in the late sixteenth century. It describes massive thunderstorms with sudden and violent gusts of wind. Only in the middle of the nineteenth century do English-speaking colonizers apply the term to the swirling tumults of the American Midwest.
IV. I can’t not write about the spiral.
A. I am twenty-one and hungover. I am painting a watercolor of a lioness for a comic about storms and girls. The caption reads: one million trains.
i. This is the sound of a tornado ripping through the atmosphere. The wind grows so loud it sounds like a million train whistles blowing air churning headed straight toward you. If you are outside watching the incoming vortex and it isn’t moving across the horizon you must shelter. It is moving toward you.
V. Tornado (noun): taken also from Spanish tornar [to turn, return].
A. Perhaps an attempt to further specify the translation. Perhaps an attempt to differentiate the tornado from other fierce weather patterns. Perhaps an indication of the need to describe the whirling, the turning, the long-stretching funnel like a straw to the gods.
VI. It is a spring evening and I am twelve. The thunderhead is moving in. My family watches from the back porch. The cloudmass spins. My dad says we should go inside, yet none of us move. It descends: a whirlpool. A massive funnel cloud. Black and blue and glimmering. It is terrifying and it is beautiful and it is gone past us before the next blink.
A. I am reminded now of a hot tub in Florida on a vacation when I am still wearing one-piece swimsuits. A girl I met and I swim like koi fish in a round pond, and the water whirls between us into a beautiful spinning maelstrom.
B. I am reminded now of the windstorm off the Gulf Coast; standing on the condo balcony, wind ripping off the sea, blowing the tears from our eyes straight into the glass window. The building groans but the sky is clear, no waterspout in sight.
C. I am reminded now of bathing with my sister in our shared porcelain bathtub, coloring the slick walls with bathtub markers, pouring buckets of now-cold water onto each other’s heads, and watching the water drain slowly, emptying the tub, in impossibly small whirlpools.
VII. The creation of the National Weather Service can be credited to a tornado in what is now Chicago, Illinois, 1855. Over the course of an hour, a tornado ripped at homes, toppled barns, and claimed the lives of at least four people. There were no sirens, no mass warning, no hospitals to be born in; only farmers on porches or in beds with cotton linens, children in yards or living rooms on handmade rugs, babies on laps or in wooden cradles, listening to the storm rage. This is one of the earliest reported-on tornadoes in the country.
VIII. The National Weather Service banned public tornado alerts until 1952 to avoid public panic.
IX. On a website called The Tornado Project (copyright 2015), the authors list the Top Ten U.S. Killer Tornadoes. All except one occurred before 1950. Number seven, however, is Joplin, Missouri, May 22, 2011, when a rated EF5 tornado ripped through the city.
A. I have watched the CCTV footage from inside the hospital. The wind seam rips the building apart. I watched the parked cars shake, shudder, be dragged across the asphalt lot. I watched cushions ripped from chairs, ceiling panels shredded, lightbulbs shattered. The cameras don’t have microphones, so I can’t hear the walls being wrenched apart by two hundred and fifty miles per hour winds.
X. My studio apartment that I move into twelve years after May 22, 2011, is in Springfield, Missouri, forty-five minutes northeast of Joplin. Both cities lie on the “I-44 Corridor,” a section of Interstate-44 that stretches across the country’s tornado alley, tracing historic Route 66. My apartment is two minutes south of the highway. I can hear the semi-trucks and police sirens at night. And sometimes, I can hear the whistle of a train.
A. I am reminded now of the wet wind whipping the spit from my mouth as I open it to speak. Storms predicted all evening but Kayla and I still walk to the campus gym. Two months before the bathtub. Gray blue black the sky becomes. We spend an hour sheltering in the women’s locker room after the sirens go off, sitting against the lockers, listening to the girls chatting and toilets flushing and thunder rumbling and the radios on the trainers’ belts crackling with static.
XI. The Enhanced Fujita Scale (EF-Scale) is used to measure tornado intensity, based on the severity of damage a tornado causes. Replacing the traditional Fujita Scale in 2007, the EF-Scale retains the same basic design by rating tornadoes in six intensity categories from zero (light damage) to five (incredible damage). The rating is determined based on wind speed and the costs of resulting property damage.
A. An EF5-ranked tornado typically lasts several minutes. In some cases, like Joplin, Missouri, it can last exactly thirty-eight.
B. An EF5-ranked tornado can vary in size. In some cases, like Joplin, Missouri, it can be over a mile wide.
C. An EF5-ranked tornado may not necessarily result in mass casualties. In some cases, like Joplin, Missouri, it did.
XII. Property damage, unlike human fatalities, allows for a reasonable gauge of certainty. We know ninety-mile-per-hour winds can and will cause windows to shatter. We know one hundred-mile-per-hour winds can and will cause roof shingles to detach and take flight. We know two hundred mile per hour winds can and will uproot trees older than asphalt, will suck homes and vehicles into the air.
XIII. In some cases, like Joplin, Missouri, an EF-5 tornado will raze a town.
A. The damage amounted to over two billion dollars then. Adjusted for inflation, that is approximately four billion dollars now. The insurance payout was the highest in Missouri history.
I. It is nine thirty in the morning and I am hiding in my bathtub. The sirens are a scream that merges with the hoarser squall of the wind, something primordial, shaking the frame of my apartment’s singular window. A million trains. Autumn calls me as my power goes out and asks if I’m safe. I lie in fetal position with my cheek against the porcelain and I say I don’t know. She’s only three miles east of me at Menards, where the storm has already passed. I listen to her work the cash register and I feel the urge to pray.
A. I was raised Catholic. I no longer practice.
i. The storm is on top of me.
XIV. If you do not have a storm cellar, or a basement, or a ditch off the side of the road, the best place to shelter during a tornado is a bathtub. They are sturdy, are often located in a central room of the house, and can fit a human body. It is recommended to cover yourself with pillows or a mattress, in case of debris.
A. Usually, the storms come at night. I crack my apartment’s solitary window before bed so the siren’s whine will wake me.
XV. One hundred fifty-eight people lost their lives on May 22, 2011. One thousand one hundred fifty people were injured.
A. The storm was so sudden that many had no time to find shelter.
B. Imagine the sky darkening like spilled ink mixed with mud over a high school graduation party. The smell of char fills the air from backyard grills and pool parties. There is joy here: parents and children and friends and lovers and siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles and coworkers and acquaintances and neighbors from down the street; everyone outside, the air thick and encompassing. The youngest children shout as they play, jump into pools. Pop songs play on the radio, loud and tinny.
C. As the sky bruises, the wind picks up, blowing spit and paper plates and colorful napkins into the air like backward confetti. Adults watch the sky, children play in the spaces between the earliest raindrops. The locusts and moths and gnats disappear and the crows and cardinals and bluebirds take flight, calling to each other before going silent.
D. Then, the downpour: rain thick in sheets, rain heavy like blood, pounding against the pavement, chasing the parents and children inside homes or under carports. Maybe some turned on the news broadcast and followed their instructions, herding children and pets and precious items into basements or cellars or central rooms. Some don’t. The hail starts: tennis-ball-sized. It dents the roofs of vehicles and carves a path for the incoming destruction. Through it, the sirens scream, though some survivors say they went off and then went silent and then went off and then went silent and then went off and then went swallowed by sound.
E. Then, the sound of trains. Through the pounding rain and hail, the parents and children hear the whirling, the screaming, the wind blowing a hundred miles per hour. The rain falls sideways.
F. Then, the funnel. Rain-wrapped, invisible, eating power lines that explode into surges like green fireworks against the black. Eating bricks from flowerbeds and branches from trees. It pulls roofs and walls asunder. It pulls anyone exposed toward the ocean of wind, the finger of god, consuming all.
G. It rendered them unrecognizable: the parents and children and friends and lovers and siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles and coworkers and acquaintances and neighbors down the street. A person can only take so much force before splitting, before the features are ripped from their faces: eyes from sockets, lips from jaws, fingers from hands, legs from torso. To become parts. To be yanked into the air. To crush a skull. To eviscerate, to disembowel. To scream a throat raw for no sound to be heard. To watch another struggle to hold on, fail, and fly away.
H. To know that joy was here just minutes before.
I. What is the economy for a human body.
IV. I can’t not write about the spiral.
A. The way a tornado forms is still a theory, because humans can't gather data by entering the funnel. We think, thanks to the work of meteorologists and storm chasers, that most form when the mesocyclone of a supercell thunderstorm is dragged downward by increasing rainfall. The cool air of the downdraft mixes with the warm air of the updraft. The slurry of birth.
B. New data reveals that the country’s Tornado Alley patterns have shifted. By analyzing patterns of tornado births over the last seventy years, meteorologists state the hot spot for tornado formation, places that almost guarantee tornado life, has shifted from central Illinois, Iowa, eastern Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas to southern Illinois, western Tennessee and Kentucky, northern Mississippi and Alabama, and the boot heel of Missouri.
XVI. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which houses the National Weather Service, had over one thousand employees fired in February 2025. Three hundred and seventy-five of these employees worked for the National Weather Service.
A. Various journalists have speculated that these firings were meant to lay the groundwork for privatizing these agencies. Many lobbyists and constituents have ties to private weather-tracking companies that would benefit from that privatization.
XVII. Would the sirens scream of danger if they are not publicly funded. Would I need to subscribe to know when the condensation funnel cloud first touches the ground.
XVIII. When the horizon darkens, I listen for the deadquiet. It comes before the downpour; the cicadas go silent and the finches take cover. They know when the first lightning will strike. I watch the leaves on the trees turn inside out and taste the humidity on my tongue. The sky becomes muddy, hazy, purple and green like the dregs of a cauldron. Then, the rain comes down in sheets.
XIX. Ask myself is it moving toward me. Wonder if I filled and drained the tub would the water dance in spirals of its own creation. Find in myself a love, deep and ancient, stirred only by the gale that rips hundred-year-old trees up root by root.
I. It is nine thirty in the morning and I am hiding in my bathtub. I text my girlfriend “pray for me.” I feel the wall shudder under the force of the wind and wonder if the trees that shade my window from the sun will bear it, wonder if the mourning doves and the crows that roost among the branches will survive and come back and rebuild.
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Emily K. Lewandowski is a writer from St. Louis, Missouri. Her comics have been published in Black Warrior Review and Hobart, and her fiction has been published in Pacifica Review. Recently, she has been listening to Naomi Scott and caring for her sourdough starter, Loaf.
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