Dating : Storm People

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.