tornado season
by Lucas Flatt
My bicycle helmet doesn’t fit, because, and really this is the first thing you ought to know about me, I have a giant fucking watermelon head. So, it’s not the helmet’s fault. They had to special order me a football helmet in the fifth grade. I don’t know who “they” were. The government?
Anyway, Beansie digs it. His helmet fits as he’s got a normal-sized toddler head. I mean, it’s a little big, but his mother’s kind of smallish head has mitigated my genetic fallout. He’s under the blanket with M and Sushi. Sushi digs it not, because it’s probably swampy under there and she’s stuck in her baby-carrier which always pisses her off. M is as ever focused on trying to comfort Sushi and keep Beansie under the blanket.
I’m not helping much. I’m barely keeping it together. That’s usually my job.
Having blankets in our bathroom is giving me serious ick, but mostly I’m feeling my pulse pound against the straining helmet strap and grinding my teeth and dry-swallowing like I do when I’m scared.
Will a tornado smash the house down on top of us? Will I feel my toddler son expire crushed under the impressive weight of our house and the relatively still impressive weight of me? Will it hurt?
For some reason I either imagine M and Sushi will be fine or I don’t imagine their fate at all. Maybe it’s boys vs. girls here in the end times. But I know that M will do whatever is superhumanly possible to keep Sushi safe, first, and then also Beans, but that ostensibly falls to me, as per her plan.
It hits me now that where I usually imagine the house toppling in, the real danger is more likely the house being torn asunder and exposing us, or else the whole situation torn skyward and scattering us all to the non proverbial winds.
Is it callous to think this way? Obviously we don’t die in this tornado, as I’m not a ghost. On the other hand, quite a few locals did die in a tornado a few years back, just before Covid hit. Our loathsome president came to town and met with survivors and showed, from what I’ve heard, genuine grief and remorse over the loss of several small children. Maybe no one is entirely bad.
Except maybe me, sitting in the half bath and focused entirely on not wanting to die, despite the close proximity of all those I most dearly love.
Later on, M and I will drag down the mattress and have a slumber party in the den so we can make a break, if needed, for the half bath. I’ll hold my toddler’s hand. He’ll say he’s scared, but maybe he just doesn’t want to go to sleep. I get it. I don’t want the slumber party to be over, either. I don’t really like the Lightning McQueen movie, but his hand is so much smaller than mine that he’s really only holding my thumb. And I think he’s honestly a little scared. We can see the lightning through the big windows over the back porch. He keeps asking if it’s OK. He’s afraid of lightning, I guess. He’s afraid of being burned. He got burned once in a very stupid accident (my fault) and his belly’s all healed up but he won’t take hot baths or get close at all to fires.
“The lightning won’t hurt us, baby.”
“Do we need to go to the bathroom?”
I can’t tell if he wants to go for the adventure—and he hates bedtime—or if he’s honestly scared. I think it’s both, always both, with him. “No, baby. Go to sleep.”
I’ve misunderstood, and pretty soon he pees on us and the good blankets. Not the bathroom blankets. Everybody pees on those.
What would you do, in the crescendo of the storm, if you thought the tornado was bearing down on you and your little boy and your baby girl and your wife. Would you shout above the locomotive roar, “Take her, not me, you God damn tornado, I’m too afraid to die?”
I don’t recommend it. Maybe she’s forgiving me. It could happen. You just put on the helmet and hope.
BIO: Lucas Flatt's work has appeared in X-R-A-Y Lit, Pithead Chapel, Maudlin House, and Puerto del Sol, among other fine establishments. He has been longlisted in the 2026 Jeanne Leiby Chapbook Award and won the 2016 Larry Brown Short Story award at Pithead Chapel, and teaches at Volunteer State Community College. He lives with Merry, Ira, and Susie in Tennessee.