After the Storm

When the wind blew over the first tree with a crack like a bone snapping, Ellie Simpson was already awake to hear it. She peeled herself off the cushions of the vinyl couch, where she was sleeping instead of in bed with her boyfriend, and pried open the screen door to her trailer. Her bare arms prickled with goosebumps at the sound of the hissing trees and garbage skittering across the front lawn. There had been warnings about the storm on the television, before the power went out, but nobody expected the wind and rain to amount to much.

Ellie wanted Chris to do something about it, like tighten the wires securing her trailer to the ground or stretch duct tape across their windows, or at least tell her that the trailer wouldn't blow away. But Chris just coughed the rattling cough he'd had for the past week and washed some medicine down. With his fever, he was too hot to sleep next to anyway.

Ellie rubbed her eyes and sat on the wooden steps in front of her trailer. Next door, the overgrown grass on Mr. Peterson's patch of lawn swayed like a choppy ocean, and the tin sign for his auto shop rattled against his makeshift garage. The old fart never cleaned his place, and his boy Joey only cut the lawn once a month. Now it looked like the whole works -lawn, trailer, garage, and tin sign - were about to take to the air and crash headlong into Ellie's place.

A flashlight bobbed three trailers down, its line of light cutting the darkness with a wobbly beam. It was Miss Rose. Ellie drew in a breath to call her over, but she was afraid she'd scare the old woman. Ellie touched her stomach and hunched lower on the steps. She didn't want to comfort someone else right now. She wanted someone to come to her for a change and tell her things were going to be fine.

Continued...

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