Twister

Devices ping, screens flash
Tornado Warning In Your Area!

I see movement in my periphery.
I peer up and out my office window,
see trees several stories high buffet in the winds.

Rains come sideways, vertical, diagonal
— an intentional pattern?
Perhaps the gods and goddesses
are weaving the tornado a tartan for the occasion.

My teen joins me, pushes past,
presses belly to full-length window.
"Yes. The most exposed part of the house
is always the safest place to be in a tornado."
Straight delivery.

She rolls her eyes.
"Mom we should be in the basement."
She cranes her neck,
both palms flat on single pane glass.

A generation bred on IMAX and 4DX,
she seeks a better angle.
All the better to absorb visual chaos,
and to accompany surround-sound
rush and rumble, roaring raindrops.

"The skies turn green when a tornado come—"
I resume.
She cuts me off mid-syllable: IKNOW.

I squint, wonder on how to name the color of the clouds.
"Yellow and gray is — grellow?"
More eye rolls, can I be surprised?

"I am not going to the basement."
She proactively rebuffs, talking over me as I say:
"We should, probably, go to the basement."

So we stand, still, stubborn.
Still, able to be awed.

We drop to a rare, comfortable silence
as the heavens battle the forest.
I point my phone out the window,
try to capture a live view.

Before we are ready, whirlwinds shift, skies brighten.
I press Stop on my camera app.
Her pupils constrict back to normal judgement diameter.
Back to our previously scheduled programming,
spell broken, she pushes past me without a word.

Though marked safe from a tornado,
the warm front of adolescence meeting
the cold front of motherhood
means storms can drop without warning.