The Storm

If you listen, you can hear the rain drops hitting the cement outside and nothing else. It's quiet, except for those drip drops falling ever so slowly. If you smell, you will smell the cold, wet air as it passes through the open window all the way to your nose. If you care, you'll read the words I have to say about what happened that day.

Yesterday.

It all started like a normal day. I woke up to the sound of my alarm beeping, honestly the alarm is my fail safe to not miss lunch time, therefore the sun was supposed to be high up in the sky, but today it was raining hard. I got out of bed, had a shower, making sure to wash my blonde locks, which is my best feature, got dressed in simple jeans and a white T-shirt, and set out for the kitchen down the hall. Our mobile home is small. It has a kitchen, living room, bathroom, and two rooms, mine and my dad's; My dad is never usually home and his room is always cleaned. I understand he has to be gone for military purposes a lot, and I know I'm 19 and can take care of myself, but it gets lonely by yourself. For lunch I always make myself a sandwich of some sort. Today I made a grilled cheese. You can never go wrong with that. After I made my sandwich I went and sat down on the couch and turned on the TV to watch the local news.

"...If you're just tuning in now, you need to quickly pack up all you can in a small bag and get to the nearest police station in order to be evacuated before the storm hits, I repeat.." The news woman was being so loud and quick about this update. She seems so panicked about the whole storm idea. Is it really that bad of rain? It couldn't be. My dad would have said something. That's when I notice that my phone was blinking every color in in the spectrum. There's 10 missed call notifications, 2 voicemails, 16 messages, and 1 emergency broadcast alert notifying me that the whole city is being evacuated. I immediately call my dad, which, of course, resulted in no service. The storm was too close already. Just then the TV lost signal and went to the blizzard channel, black and white fuzz danced on the screen. Shit.

I looked outside and it looked just like a normal grey sky over top my house. It was not to far in the distance, where the color of the sky turns from dark blue to darker blue to completely black with occasional flashes of bright, BRIGHT bolts of lightning. The wind was already kicking it wildly. Garbage and children's toys were blowing around the street, and not too long after, small tree branches were starting to fall and blow around too. The whole trailer park looked empty. Every house had no lights on, no cars in their drive ways, and no sounds or heartbeats. I was the last one left.

I went back into the house and locked the door. I don't know why I thought this would help, but it was more of a mental protection. I grabbed snacks from the kitchen, which would include only three bags of ketchup chips and a 2L of cream soda, and headed straight to my room. In my room I made sure to secure all the windows tightly and cover them up with whatever furniture I could; a bookshelf and my desk turn sideways. I grabbed my twin bed and flipped it to the side to cover up the closet since I deemed it the safest place in my room for this moment. Sitting in my closet, I have now started to realize how over dramatic the whole situation seemed. It was only a thunderstorm. As soon as my guard started to lower, I started to hear a loud siren start to ring from outside. Trying to think back on what I thought the sound might be, it finally kicks in. It's the alarm for a tornado.

Panic mode rebooted.

This is it. They cleared everyone in the city and it's me against mother nature. By this point, all I hear is the loud siren screaming outside, the clapping of lightning getting closer and closer, and of course every little thing that hits the house. I find myself thinking back on if watching the whole season of that show last night was worth it. On the one hand, it made me laugh, on the other, I might die today. The thought made me chuckle because I'm all I have right now and "laughter is the best medicine," as folks have always told me. My thoughts were, of course, interrupted by a lightning clap that sounded WAY too loud for my comfort. The reason it sounded close, of course, is the reason it looked brighter outside suddenly. My curiosity was peaked so I had to look... the mobile home across from mine was on fire.

Panic mode INCREASED.

How is it on fire when there is this much rain?! Do I stop it? I can't call for help with no service. Should I stay home? Should I try finding somewhere else to go? Shit. Shit. Shit. Without time to think of anything else, I start to pack my snacks, grab the best rain coat, the grey one with the sleeve that has my name, and run. I don't really understand where I'm running, all I know is that it's in the opposite way from the storm and out of the trailer park.

Outside the fence that kept the trailer park sectioned off from the city was Yellow Mont St. It was the longest street in the city. The beginning was somewhere in the middle of the city and the end was the trailer park, I have a lot of ground to cover in the next four minutes, I don't expect myself to run farther than that. I might be skinny, but I'm not in shape. Well running down the street I see regular houses, all with no lights and no heartbeats, until this one house; A blue house with a giant window in the front, a bush, a garage, but the thing that caught my attention the most was the car that was parked in the drive way. My ticket to freedom! It was a normal looking white car. I tried the door and, to my luck, it opened without a fight. The keys were even in the car already! I turned it on and drove out of the parking lot and down the street as fast as I could. Since there are no cars on the road, I was able to do 80 km/hr all the way through town to the outskirts.

My panic disappeared the further I got, and the less storm I heard.

Freedom.

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"Have you called his dad yet?" Officer Bans asked Officer Yeaks.

"Yes sir, he said this has happened before and will be here shortly," he replied to his officer in command. Both men dressed appropriately in their work uniforms, nicely trimmed beards, and low cut brown hair, almost lookalikes aside from the age Bans had over Yeaks.

"I still don't understand it completely," Yeaks continues. "Do you think he believes himself?"

"Only a trained professional would be able to tell. To us, all we know is the boy is sick," Bans replies softly. "Do you think he believes himself? He seems pretty confident in the whole story."

"The kid ripped his room apart, burnt his neighbor's house down, and stole a car, and he claims he didn't see anyone when people were yelling at him, chasing him out the trailer park, and crashed into at least three cars on his car chase all the way out to the gravel." Yeaks couldn't comprehend how anyone would ever be able to see anything else than the truth.

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