On Friday night, just before sundown, warning sirens sounded as a wall of dark clouds moved overhead. When everyone’s phones erupted simultaneously in warning, I went onto the back deck, where I could see the clouds turning. Slowly, a spindle fell.
The video above was taken in the front yard and captures the tornado’s closest point to the house, barely a mile away at the next intersection.
The drone footage below starts at our local YMCA, where my dad has been working out since his health scare earlier this year. The tornado tossed two dozen cars into the building, which is right next to the grocery store where we all were shopping just five hours before the storm.
Car accidents, even fatal ones, happen all the time—once every fifteen minutes in the US alone. We all know that. But it doesn’t stop us from staring whenever we see that sheet on the road.
We know that people are dying of cancer right now, more than any of us could count. But it’s still a horror to witness.
We know people are robbed. We know they are murdered. These things happen. But there is a difference between them happening, even with regularity, to others and them happening even once to us.
There’s not a name for that sensation, but there ought to be.
As a writer, it feels like in moments like this I should have something pithy to say about mortality and serendipity—or even pure, dumb luck. I mean, if weather conditions had varied just a little…
But then I remembered I did have something to say. I wrote about it once, several years ago. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I’ll share it here.
The following passage comes from Curse of the Red Dagger, the second course of Feast of Shadows, my epic urban occult mystery, in a chapter titled Never Play Cards With a Sorcerer. It’s the very end of that course, in fact, and the narrator, a young artist named Cerise Song, is reflecting on the fact that she’s about to be willingly murdered…
That’s it, I guess. They’re kinda waiting on me now. Little bit nervous. It’s so crazy not knowing what’s going to happen in, like, an hour. But then, we never really do, do we? We just think we do—until something happens to wake us from the illusion: a car crash, news of cancer, a child’s first breath. Etude says that’s where Life is lived. Not respiration and metabolism. Not work and school and laundry and groceries. Not the long sleep of existence but where it shatters. Those few brief flashes where we’re awake to our own consciousness, like a too-bright light. That’s where the angels live, and the ones he called the Others. I think that’s where he lives, too.
But not me. I can barely stand it. I feel burnt down, like my mind is on fire, like someone turned the saturation of the world to 200%. It hurts my eyes to look. Knowing these moments could be my last, I sit catatonic with wonder. The slightest breath enchants me. The patient throb of my heart. The bend of the light through the pane. The bob of a branch as a bird alights. I want to draw it all, to reflect, if only in one image, that rapture I feel, the rapture of being alive. I think that’s all art is, really.
We never really know what’s going to happen next. Even when we think we do. So I guess we’ll see.
I guess we’ll see.
Here is this month’s picture of Henry—listening to his mom talking to him through the camera from Japan.
That’s it for this time. I’m glad you’re here.
The Sixth Dispatch