Storm People

Someone who is truly a storm at heart has the most peculiar eyes. They’re grey and silvery like the eyes of many people, but there’s something else strange and wild behind them. Look too long, and you’ll swear you see dark, roaming clouds reflected in those eyes, not to mention a lightning flash or two. Their voices are low and melodious, like the rumbling of thunder or the crash of the ocean against the cliffs when the waves are especially treacherous — soothing, but unsettling at the same time.

Storm people have a restless way about them. They’re never quite calm, especially during storm season. They always look as if they’re late for something important or otherwise have somewhere else they need to be. They’re a distant sort of people, never appearing particularly friendly or having many close acquaintances. Everyone’s aware of them, but nobody knows them.

The chances are very good that you already know one or more storm people, especially if you happen to live somewhere storms are common during certain seasons. Just as humans can be forces of nature, forces of nature can also be human. And they’re everywhere — waiting for the next moment that allows them to unravel themselves and be who and what they truly are.

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Tommy lives a relatively quiet life as a Nebraska farmer these days, but he didn’t start out that way. He’d actually begun his existence as a small, twisted breath of damp air on a stormy day. That little breath quickly developed into a large, threatening swirl. Soon, the swirl had become a full-fledged twister, ravaging the land.

Tommy’s first clear thoughts were of spinning, twirling, and twisting his way across the countryside as the incredible force he could tell that he was. The further he traveled and the more he destroyed, the more self-aware he became. He tore through a field, ripping up many acres of corn by the roots. He lifted a lost milk cow up, up, up into the air in a breathtaking spiral dance that left said cow confused and bewildered, miles away from where she’d started out that day.

Next, Tommy ripped his way through a trailer park. He lifted some of the houses up off of their foundations, dropping them just as roughly and causing a deafening racket as he did so. Other houses he decimated until they were nothing but brick dust and hunks of twisted metal. And a few houses — chosen at random — he left entirely alone. For reasons he didn’t entirely understand, those just hadn’t looked as fun to destroy, so he elected to pass them by and go on to the next row.

Finally, more than an hour later — quite a good run for a tornado — the terrible engine inside of Tommy that compelled him to spin, and spin, and spin, and destroy burned itself out. And all was quiet again. And Tommy the man was born, weathered and stocky with white-blonde hair and the strange grey eyes that are the calling card of any storm person.

No one questioned where Tommy had come from or considered the timing of his arrival in town. At most, they would have thought he was crazy for moving to a town that had just seen such a terrible storm rip through it, but that was about it. People here didn’t think about much. They were too busy with their small daily concerns — what was on TV that night and whether the corner store would have milk back in stock by the time they dropped by later.

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Tommy’s life was normal in almost every way. He ran his small farm to the best of his ability, managing much of the work himself, as he really didn’t enjoy working with others. He fixed simple meals for himself in the morning and then again at night. He read the papers, although he had trouble really understanding what people found so compelling about the headlines. He drove his beat-up pick-up into town as needed to get supplies. Then he’d go to sleep so he could be up bright and early to do it all again the next day.

But then the summer would arrive. The temperature would rise and the days would grow long and hot. With it came storm season, and that’s when Tommy would change. He’d get increasingly restless, a little at first and then more as the days wore on and the pressure inside him built. Then one day, the force inside him would reach critical mass and he’d know it was time.

The next thing he knew, his flesh was dissolving into air currents and his consciousness was rising into the air. Then a storm would strike somewhere in Nebraska or an area nearby. It would choose its path of certain destruction, destroying some and sparing others. It would be the cause of screams and sorrow. Then it would disappear as quickly as it came, leaving Tommy to be Tommy again until the next time the right conditions presented themselves in tornado country.

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Maggie lived in sunny Florida, not sprawling Nebraska, but her life was similar to Tommy’s all the same. She was tall and thin with curly shoulder-length brown hair and beautiful, freckled skin. She ran a surf shop by the beach, and it showed in the golden tan she sported year-round and her devil-may-care beach bum attire.

Like all storm people, her eyes were grey and wild as the storms that would spin across the ocean and up over the coastline throughout the summer and early fall every year. Come June and July, she’d take on a distant, haunted look that left those who knew her dying to know what was going on in that head of hers.

Maggie herself wouldn’t have minded knowing herself. She tended to wander lost inside the wilderness of her own mind when she got like that. It wasn’t something she could help. It was just a feeling that came over her sometimes, especially when she watched the waves and felt the ocean wind stir her shining brown curls.

She knew it meant that familiar frenzy would come over her soon — when storm season approached. She both loved and feared those terrible moments. She loved the feeling of rightness that accompanied a full transformation into one of Florida’s famous hurricanes. When she was the hurricane, she was at her most elated and whole on a level that could never be achieved when she was in her human form.

But when she was human, she regretted the damage done to the communities she loved — to the customers who frequented her shop and surfed the waves with her on the weekends. However, Maggie could not help what she was. She tried to remind herself that even hurricanes were part of the natural order of things in their own way.

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A sweet, smart, sporty girl like Maggie couldn’t help but make friends. But what were friends, anyway? Weren’t they people who knew you? Maggie may have been a storm person, but she was like anyone else in that she wished someone could see her for what she was without feeling the very reasonable urge to run away screaming in terror.

In the meantime, there were always online support groups. She was a member of one for people with anger management problems they couldn’t seem to get on top of. She felt for such people — related to the struggle that comes with wanting to be calm and peaceful at heart, but knowing that you simply aren’t cut out for it. Using angry human outbursts as a metaphor for her very non-metaphorical life as a hurricane didn’t quite alleviate all the turmoil she felt inside, but it did help. It made her feel heard and seen if nothing else.

And she really did relate to some of the other members on a level that was uncanny. Sometimes they’d all meet virtually over Zoom to hang out together and talk things out without having to type furiously, and she’d become distracted by some of their eyes. Several of the other members had eyes just like hers — eyes that looked like storms emerging over the horizon. It was enough to make her wonder whether she was as alone in the world as she often felt.

One of them was a farmer in Nebraska by the name of Tommy. Another was a middle-aged woman called Carmen who lived in California. There was a Samoan man from the islands with the same eerie eyes — especially rare for someone from that part of the world.

The funny thing was that despite finding her own eyes and the forces hidden behind them threatening when she looked in the mirror, Maggie found the storms in the eyes of others surprisingly beautiful. Wasn’t that funny. The way seeing a piece of yourself reflected back in the eyes of another could make you see your whole identity differently. But surely that was her imagination. What a funny coincidence that would be.