I’ve always hated when people call tornadoes ‘twisters’. It makes them sound fake and less likely to kill the cow they pick up. I’ve never seen anything live after being thrown around in a storm like that, but once, I did see a horse lying in the pasture behind my neighbor’s white fence, slowly dying on the piece of debris it was impaled on.
I had never been in a real tornado before that day, and I had also never watched an animal take its last quivering breaths like that, but I suppose there’s a first time for everything.
The entire storm was unusual, so I should’ve seen it coming. I know everything about thunderstorms and the monsters that spawn out of them (one of my strange childhood hyperfixtations) but nothing was how it should’ve been. Tornadoes usually happen in the late afternoon, but this one happened as the sun rose. It didn’t need to wait all day for the air to get hot because the 100-degree week left the Earth scorching. The sirens also never went off, which had never happened before, so when the funnel touched down, the roar of the thing let everyone know it was coming. I was already awake because I could never fall asleep, so when it started to hail, I woke up everyone else in the house, and we went downstairs, just to be safe. When the power went out, only a trickle of the oncoming sunrise left the room otherwise shadowed in the dark storm clouds. My sister clung to me as we watched the news on my phone, and her thick fear made the room hard to breathe in, so my dad decided it was best to go into the storm shelter.
I held my breath as we descended the stairs, and wound my free hand, the one not in my sister’s grasp, tightly around my tattered baby blanket.
I got to the fourth step down, preparing myself for when we would go back upstairs and the house would be torn from its foundation, but suddenly, it was over. The meteorologist in my hand told us it was all clear. The tornado had dissipated.
I let out a quiet huff of relief and turned away from the dark cellar. It felt like eyes were watching me from the blackness down there, the monsters and demons begging me to stay, but I swallowed the lump of a lingering fear in my throat, and walked into the light of the now clear morning.
My dad and I decided to go and survey the damage outside while my mom and sister called the power company. I wished I would’ve stayed in the house with them.
Our house was basically untouched by the tornado, just some dents in the siding from hail, but the yard was a mess. Torn leaves and splintered branches covered everything I could see and the dirt driveway had turned to mush from all the torrential rain. There were also small pieces of my neighbor’s white wooden fence in places far from where they once stood, which I found strange. I always thought that fence was indestructible. Especially after the time my sister rammed into it with a four-wheeler and there wasn’t even a scratch on it after.
“Do you hear that?” My dad asked, his voice rough with worry.
I shook my head, trying to hear whatever he was talking about, and was about to say he must be hearing things when a grown came from the neighbor’s pasture.
“Is that a person?” I croaked out, barely keeping up as I ran after my dad as he followed the agonized sound.
He didn’t answer me, but he didn’t have to. There was a horse in the middle of the open pasture with a giant piece of white and stained dark red fence stuck in its neck. Blood was drowning the giant animal to death as it blubbered out of its wound and mouth.
I gasped and fell backward, tailbone hitting the wet ground with a squelching thud, as I gaped at the poor horse.
“Damn twister,” my dad mumbled.
There was nothing I could do, and I guess my dad thought the same, so we just watched the animal die. It probably only took about a minute, but time felt long and slow in the green pasture. I was level with the horse on the ground and I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the black ones boring into my soul. It’s like its eyes were trying to tell me something. That I would be next. That everything I knew would be ripped away from me in the quiet dawn, and I would die if I forgot this moment. The horse was trying to warn me about my imminent doom.
Be afraid, its eyes said. Yours is coming.
About the Author
Grace Anderson is a queer, feminist writer currently attending Columbia College Chicago seeking a Bachelor of Arts degree. With a fiction focus, Anderson covers anything from fantastical new realms to personal anecdotes about her primal fear of everything. Anderson has received several scholar and recognition Awards from her school pertaining to her creative writing student career, and also currently leads the English and Creative Writing program’s end-of-year festival Manifest as the lead student officer. In the meantime, Anderson works as a tutor with Varsity Tutors, Lessonpal, and is working to finish her novel about a boy, and a god, and how they fall in love.
