Bride of the Tornado

by James Kennedy

I went to the thrift store alone and I bought clothes that felt haunted, and books that felt forgotten, and knickknacks that seemed from another planet,

When you’re alone, everything feels more intense. But it also feels like you’re only half experiencing it.

Something triggers inside you when a popular person actually stops to focus on you; you let yourself be led, you laugh when you usually wouldn’t, your body obeys,

Most times, hanging out with the group, I’d just put my headphones on, blast music into my ears, and watch. With a soundtrack everything seemed more intense and meaningful. Even people I didn’t like seemed almost okay.

How public, like a frog

I was from another planet. My body was banged up, head cleared out, split open and new. I felt new but like I had touched something very old.

wanted to keep feeling what I was feeling, I wanted to figure it out, I wasn’t done with it yet.

“The tornadoes let us all go but they kept him.”

Contamination is purified only by the death of the impure

The skies were packed with dark clouds but the sun still shone brightly through a gap, making everything glow with alien brilliance.

I was separate.

the house was empty and lonely in that depressing autumn late afternoon way, like when the lights have turned on in the other houses up and down the dark street, and other families are sitting down to dinner together, but you haven’t thought to turn on the lights in your own house because you’re alone, and you’re wondering why you feel so gloomy and meaningless.

“Are you sexually active?” Cecilia said, “Vividly.”

It is something to be truly and totally seen.

How dreary to be somebody!

I am satisfied, I am full, I am stuffed with stored-up feelings, joy and terror and everything in between, full to bursting. Ready to transmit.

she had a dead smile, her naked body cut in half and spread out on the dining room table, her organs flowering out and arranged prettily, slick and wet.

the tornado killer hadn’t been protecting anyone, when he fought a tornado he was just a nightmare devouring itself, giving birth to itself, circulating its nightmare energy, and now I was part of that nightmare.

The baby-thing slithered inside me. Terror. But exhilaration.

The rain had washed me clean of the slime and blood. I was electric now. I was glowing.

“She’s in you. He’s in you. You’re us.”

Who’s it going to be for me, if not you? Who am I supposed to be, if not yours?

The baby-thing in me bloomed, melding me and him together.

The tornado curled its funnel up, lifted its tip to his mouth, a perfect black circle. I saw the black circle too because I was with the tornado killer, I was inside his mind, he was spotting me in the school gym, he was watching me from the edge of Archie’s party, I was throwing a flower to him across the prairie, he was flooding my bedroom with flowers, we were finding each other in the clouds, I was taking care of him at Archie’s house, we were kissing in the quarry pool, we were dancing to records at Archie’s, we were jumping on the bed, we were laughing— We entered the black circle together.

I’m nobody. Who are you?

Whenever I saw someone, especially someone who looked like they’d messed up in life, like they’d made some bad choices, or had bad luck, no matter how badly they had gone wrong I always thought to myself, some mother had once held them in her arms and thought, the world is brand-new for you, you can do anything, you can have a great life. I am going to try my hardest for you.

I had a rushing, emptying feeling, like escaping from a tiny hot vicious universe made just for me into a whole world made for nobody at all.