the storm that loved Callie

[granted the afflicted admittance into a select ward for constructive treatment and therapy, i.e. CWR fiction. recently very slightly edited for yet another similar application.]

Callie was, in most respects, an unremarkable girl: agreeable, hardworking, and apparently destined to lead a comfortable (if unremarkable) life. She wanted to be a nurse in the city; she wanted to marry a handsome doctor and have three beautiful children. She was headed to a good state school in the fall, where she had elected to live in a substance-free dorm. She liked to swim and ride horses and read romance novels.

The storm fell in love with Callie in the Midwest, where it saw her from a distance. Her family had flown to Omaha to attend the wedding of a cousin whom none of them knew particularly well. Her manner was pleasant and quiet and her eyes were dark, dark brown, but she never wore colored contacts or makeup to change them. Callie did not mind being unremarkable. She did not speak much at the reception, but she smiled and, time and again, informed those who asked where she was going to college in the fall and what she planned to study.

The storm saw Callie’s brown eyes first, as it kicked up dust and darkened the skies above cornfields. The eyes were leaving the wedding early, in the dusk, their color made warm by the red sunset. Next the storm saw Callie’s olive skin, and it reached out a fingertip to touch her cheek.

Callie wiped the sweat from her forehead; the humidity of the Midwest surprised her. Her family ducked into their rented car and turned on the air conditioning, and the storm lamented and broke overhead, spattering the windshield and moon roof with round tears, for the storm was not as young as it used to be. It could not follow Callie as quickly as her family’s rented car could drive back to her hotel.

Instead, it waited. From a distance it saw Callie’s short brown hair bob from the car to the automatic doors of the hotel lobby, and it wept all over Nebraska, soaking the fields and the flat, gridded roads.

She was so different, Callie. Callie was so real.

That night, before sleeping, the girl the storm loved read a few pages of her latest romance novel. She dreamt of an olive-skinned, dirty blonde man holding her tightly, like no one ever had, his chest wetter than water, his touch prickling and static. Upon waking, she knew that she had dreamt something wonderful, but she could not hold onto anything but sobbing, the small, sorrowful noises dampened by her shoulder, where the stranger hid his eyes. She remembered the sound of her dream-lover crying every time she heard the roll of thunder.

Callie’s family had an early morning flight to Chicago, and the storm could not rush to the airport in time to stop her from leaving. It arrived minutes too late and it wept all over the 737 jets, and a hundred flights were canceled. Most of the wedding guests had to stay overnight at the groom’s house.

The storm had seen Callie’s round, callused toes in their flip-flops as they stepped from taxi to terminal. Callie had never had a pedicure. She didn’t like silly things like pedicures.

The storm hurried after her plane, stirring up tornadoes in its wake, destroying houses, ripping up trees by their roots. Callie watched its thunderheads trail behind her, and thought she saw a man’s bearded face in one of them, eyes wide open, mouth trying to say something without moving. The flight attendant gave her a plastic cup of water, and when she drank, she remembered a kiss. It seemed to have happened years and years ago, but Callie had never kissed anyone, not like that. When she next looked out the window, the thunderhead had scattered into a meaningless pile of vapor, soft and distant.

Callie missed the storm again in Chicago. Another storm was on its way out, and during her layover, she watched the sun’s reflection move across the drenched tarmac. She missed someone, but wasn’t sure whom. Before sunset, she realized she missed something in her dream, something that had been like a man out of her romance novel, rippling with sweat, gentle but strong – a force of nature.

Eventually, she made her way back to the East. During her entire trip, Callie had felt tired and lonely without really understanding why. She heard her mother talking about the rain in the Midwest, the flooding in Ohio, all the damage being done. She thought about global warming and climate patterns changing.

For weeks she had been bored of weather – not just of sun or rain or gray clouds, but all weather, anything at all. Why couldn’t it rain frogs? Why couldn’t there be a hundred rainbows at once? And why did the news always cover weather happening miles and miles away, instead of important, immediate things?

If only there were new weather, thought Callie: new weather for me, a preview of the rapture, insane and catastrophic and different and here. (Callie did not often have such thoughts. She was slightly worried that she had become possessed, or a normal teenager with an overactive imagination, or possibly both.)

Days passed. One day, Callie’s family took a drive up north, their destination a mountain lake, their objective to swim and sunbathe. It was hot, humid and mercilessly cloudless, and Callie was happy to have the cool water all around her, sapping her warmth and, somehow, her loneliness. She lay on her back in the lake and wished for rain.

The storm, miles and miles south of the lake where its true love swam, saw her through the metallic heat haze. Fuming, its dwindling hope rekindled by the sight of her long legs glistening under the lake’s dark water, by the warmth of her eyes, it tumbled over itself in a mad rush to reach her. It knocked out power lines, triggered warning sirens, and drove those in its path into cellars with candles and flashlights. There was Callie, in the northern lake: beautiful, simple, wrapped in the tears of all storms that had loved and died, the laments of rivers, the deaths of tremendous glaciers, and the storm knew: she missed the rain. The sun darkened her beautiful skin, hurt her, parched her red heart – the storm would quench it – yes –

– but not yet; the way was still long, and when Callie’s family left the beach to eat dinner in a lakeside restaurant, clouds were only just beginning to appear on the western horizon. They made the sunset spectacular, and Callie watched as she sipped her glass of water, remembering cold lips, a slick body against hers. The air became hazy, the entire world pink with the last daylight.

Her parents argued over silly things, as they often did: how many drinks they would allow each other, how much money they could spend, and, of course, who would drive home. Callie had developed a habit of being silent and still around her parents when they argued, knowing too well that the slightest motion would hurt, that the knot would only bind her more tightly as she squirmed. Callie never chose to be silent. She just was.

It was decided, at last, that Callie would drive home, as the evening turned purple with clouds and night. Callie liked to drive, especially when her parents argued, because it replaced the angry, white-hot whispers with cool, concerned silence. It was a small way she could move without moving, speak without speaking. The highway was beautiful that night: clouds slowly enveloped the sky, blackening the forest and foothills long before nightfall’s normal hour. Callie soaked in the silent dark as if it were the one true cure to her sorrow, her longing that seemed so suddenly different: here was a brand of chaos she could love, from which she did not want to escape.

The lightning came slowly at first, an occasional hairline or formless flash on the horizon; slowly it thickened into a light show in countless colors and shapes. She could not understand why her heart leapt with every strike, but it leapt and it leapt, and she fought to keep her eyes on the road. Her parents had fallen asleep, and Callie drove carefully. She drove five miles per hour below the speed limit. She kept her finger on the windshield wiper control, waiting for the perfect moment, the first drop of rain.

It did not come. Callie pulled into her driveway and gently stirred her parents, who woke up just enough to relocate into their beds in their red brick house. Their daughter locked the car and walked slowly into the backyard, where thunder rumbled softly overhead.

Callie looked up and saw the storm.

“You’ve been following me,” she observed.

The storm did not reply, at least not in any way that she could understand.
“It’s okay,” she continued, pressing the storm to speak to her, to confess. She felt the static in the air, a touch she remembered on her olive skin. Lightning crackled here and there, quietly, brightly.

She dropped her purse in the grass and walked further from her house. “I don’t really know how to feel,” she admitted to the dark sky. “You followed me here – you followed me too quickly. You hurt a lot of people.”

The storm thundered apologetically. The clouds were shifting slowly, like feet covering themselves in sand. Callie understood. She lay down in the grass and closed her warm, dark eyes.

“Rain,” she breathed.