Sunday, May 06, 2012

The rooms were stacked one upon the other. The rooms? Rather the frames, the skeletons of rooms sitting on wooden pallets along the road. Highway 40. Bluff City. This patch of growth in the prairie. Below the bluff the fields stretched for miles, flying, leaping across small rivers and over sad decaying structures. The rooms, the frames, were stacked upon one another sitting in the middle of this tiny village, across from the house with the white picket fence and the sealed attic room. I was told that they were hotel rooms left over from a tornado. And every time we drove past them I could see the swirling air and hear the screeching train of storm pulling them apart. These thoughts were frightening and comforting at the same time. If this sort of horror happened to something so close by it would never happen to me. Yet it seemed that every spring and autumn, as the weather so drastically changed, we spent at least one evening sitting at a card table in our candle illumined basement listening to the battery operated radio. In that span of time, while waiting for the all clear, I imagined those shells of metal waiting to be swept away once more.



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