Shapes of the Southern Tempest
Heaviness, falling over every curve and crook in the landscape. The trees contorted like faces, stern and with striated muscles, and were fluctuating expressions between each other in hushed conversation. They breathed under the rust-tint sky and waved worried branches in the approaching wind. Elizabeth, young and imaginative and watching the billowed burst of clouds roll in from her bedroom window, felt the heaviness press down more firmly with each passing minute.
The slight girl, new to high school and always deeply concerned with her favorite fiction characters, had been hunched over jumbled mathematics before the flashings began to shock her window and lure her in for a closer look.
From the edge of her vision, it seemed like the flicker of television—only more dangerous, developing swiftly, and made for her.
The queasy motion of her favorite elm, leaning like a pendulum on the front lawn, was flashing the backs of its glossy green leaves and announcing the arrival of rain to the lonely home. That specific pattering that only a cumulonimbus could produce—it seized the curious part of her every time.
As the patter grew gradually to a light rapping, Elizabeth looked out into the fields across the road and made out every familiar figure looming in the tall grass. She studied the darkened shadows and their new murky shapes, transformed by the burden of determined rain, as they took on new forms. There was the scarecrow, waving at her like an old friend, begging to come and whisper a secret. Further down was the red barn, now maroon and weeping, struggling as always to keep up with the violent heaves of summer weather. To the left of it, standing tall and proud in the gale, was the silo.
The monument of southern life stood straight and rigid, its grey-splintered wood indifferent to the gusts of wind and debris. Its vertical reach overpowered the scenic rolls of land, and reminded Elizabeth of something to strive for—a symbol, an outline, a guiding light holding steady in hidden hollowness. Heavy rains like this always stirred the hollowness inside of her.
She found her thoughts drenched in reflection—the supercells of summer were an unforgiving contradiction to the imagery found in the bucolic paintings at the town library. All over its walls were idyllic rural highlights—flamboyant trees, babbling brooks, barns so bright they seemed alive—yet the harsh, wet reality of thunder always stripped back the golden sheens of southern life that were much easier to frame under rays of steady sun. The barn wood was splintering, the paint fading and cracked. Nobody seemed to want to paint angry clouds.
The rigid picture frames weren’t meant for anything besides that perfect southern portrait. Those colorfully-framed landscapes were relegated to a perpetual happiness, where trees were always green but never alive and swaying, birds were always airborne but never arriving, and blue skies never produced a shade darker than deep azure. Elizabeth was far from that deep blue image now, maybe always, and each summer rain only dampened the lie further.
It was drilling down in slants now. The wayward droplets unleashed electric wetness on the tin roof in waves of pressure, and Elizabeth began to feel it weighing down her eyelids. As she shut out the world around her in a kind of participatory trance with the beating hum of the tempest, she found nothing but unease. She fluttered her eyes open, and just as a flashing vein of white struck the top of the silo, made out a new figure peering from its base. She stumbled from the window like the branches writhing outside, crouching on the backs of her hands. She peered back out to find nothing. She scrutinized the fields twice over, and still, nothing.
She burst from the bedroom, fear swirling in her eyes, and plunged down the stairs two at a time to meet another crack of lightning at the front door. At first, a brilliant white—then swiftly the heavy cloak of obscurity. No lights. No power. No people. All the warmth in the house abandoned her, flickering hopes and ideals rushing out with the torrents. She realized for the first time the enormity of her isolation.
“Light, light, light,” she whispered as she felt her way towards the handheld salvation of a flashlight. She saw forms in the darkness—sitting at the dining table, motionless in the corner, pulsing from behind the window. The flashlight was in the basement, precariously, leading her to remember the vision from outside—the silo’s unidentified phantom—and the basement’s unlocked hatch door at once. She’d have to hurry.
Using each illuminated flash in the windowpane as a guiding light, Elizabeth crept towards the basement. For every three steps, there was another blinding scream. The strobes came fast and uneven, like staccato quarter notes, as deafening hail rattled her imagination. Elizabeth was using the storm to compose a stepped symphony.
Once she grazed the glinting latch of the basement door—the home’s exact center—a pillar of sound struck down on the farmhouse.
The front door whipped open in a cyclonic swivel and there, in raining luminescence, was the figure from the silo; monumental, dark, and heaving. Elizabeth whipped back. She slipped behind the white wood of the basement door, holding against her heart the hope of cloaked darkness; its ability to hide her truth from the visitor.
She descended into the belly of the farmhouse. Backing down with measured steps, unsteady breath, and adjusting eyes, Elizabeth sank into the cool temperance of the damp underground with only a splinter of hope left. A cold and helpless thought precipitated in her mind.
There were no neighbors within miles, as her mother and father wished and Elizabeth herself once enjoyed. She hated the fact now. She hated most everything these days, constantly searching for little escapes to ease the days that passed like acts. Even her favorite escape, the storylines bound by hardback fiction, had been increasingly crushed by reality. The end of her last novel held nothing but tragedy for the protagonist, a misplaced passion of a person like her, with a fate that provided nothing but familiar discomfort, especially now. The house and all its recollections held nothing but misplaced security tonight. Her left sneaker patted the hard stone floor as a muffled echo fell from the floor above like a lullaby. It was a feminine voice.
“Liza, Liza, little girl,” the pitched hoarseness rang. “So conflicted in her world.”
Elizabeth raised a tremoring hand to cover her mouth, now agape and taking in the cool darkness of the underground too quickly. She was terrified a sob would wrestle past her parsed lips and betray her position. She was concealed by the blackness, but like her now-crumbling sanctuaries, it could easily rot and give way to the mounting pressure. Worried teenage eyes peered from behind crates of canned peaches as the voice, now loud and authoritative, let out its next line.
“Too concealed in lies to see her hate-fueled horror alive in me.” The basement door oozed open. Silence so loud you could hear the air trembling.
Then, without a creak from the stair: “Fate does find your crooked mind, in horrors of the human kind.” A leak of light from the door ajar. “Your death will come from deep within, black bile writhing, tortured skin.” Elizabeth was as cold as she’d ever been. “Destined end from absent grace, unless you meet me, face to face.”
Then, stillness.
Elizabeth was splintering, processing, freezing and formless against the walls of memory. The visitor had found her out somehow. Come to catch her, like all the others she’d read about, and mutilate her mind until there was nothing left but a shudder. Elizabeth converted her revulsion in a single snap of a moment—an epiphanic choice built up through years of encroachment. In desperation, defiance, or a distraught burst of strength, Elizabeth rose up to face the shapeless.
As sharp slivers of white darted through the open door, the figure became clearer than the youth ever dared to imagine. Hunched over and pinched like a snarl, so beautiful that it was terrifying, the soft voice materialized in a bundle of delicate curves patched so obscenely that it was both misshapen and glorious. Strands of black wept from its countenance, the deep grooves on its almost-human face contorting towards an empathetic expression of pain. Sublimity.
The materialization of Elizabeth’s long-held horror was very real, and wet, and staring back at her like a reflection. Fate had no time left to wait. Elizabeth stepped forward, misty not from rain but emotion, and held out both hands.
“I know what you are,” Elizabeth creaked. “That insufferable dampness soaking the edges of my dreams. The line, like loathing, between death and desire. But still,” she broke, welling up now, “I don’t know where you come from. Did I make you, or were you given to me?”
The figure glided, with ferocious vulnerability, towards the weeping girl. She smelled of earth, slanted in two ways at once, and leaked puddles of abnormality. She caressed the adolescent face with twisted limbs, stroking a cheek shining still in the darkness, and whispered through strained syllables.
How she had grown so strong and so dark, in the soil near the silo, and sifted through strands of wheat to make home in the pit of Elizabeth’s stomach. How she twisted it up in knots at every rigid form the girl tried to fit in her youth. Sliced its slippery walls with a southern sickness, a home-grown hatred resistant to every panacea. How she would rumble and heave every time Elizabeth went to the fields, where the hate was planted by someone—or maybe everyone—Elizabeth knew, and weep every time Elizabeth wept, for she did not want to be here, and did not know her origin, and could not possibly escape without Elizabeth’s help.
With the utterance of a final truth, the manifestation twisted her head towards the rafters. She rose, letting go of the girl and expanding in waves of conquered anguish, and found purpose in her destruction.
The light cut through the darkness, and like a thousand liquid prisms collapsing, the figure burst open and onto Elizabeth. A heaviness was breaking all over her, every curve and crook, and began making way for something new. A resilient smell; petrichor. Elizabeth wept in knowledge, alone and aware, and found herself.
Photo: Michael Olsen, Unsplash