Tornado Season

By Jake Swearingen

It's mid-afternoon and the clouds are a dark lid, soaked through with water. Lucy is tracing ideograms in the dust on the coffee table. I go to open a window. The air smells blue and wet. It will rain soon.

"President," she says. We're naming off people we'd most like to get drunk with.

I straighten a picture frame. "Teddy Roosevelt. Star Wars character."

She clicks against the roof of her mouth. "Chewie. Dead actor."

So easy. "Bogart. Style of architecture."

Lucy and I have been sleeping together lately, but we're not this afternoon. She looks very pretty when she's bored. "Um... neo-Gothic. Brand of shoe."

"British Knights. War."

I sit down next her, leaning back against the couch my parents gave to me as a gift. I can feel the heat from her shoulder, but we are not touching. She spins a coaster across the coffee table, and doesn't look at me. "Seven Years War. Element."

"Neon. Any of the noble gases, really. Game show host."

Lucy looks up at the ceiling. "Who was the guy who hosted Family Feud? He was the guy in the Running Man?" Her eyes crinkle around the edges.

I own the movie. "Richard Dawson."

"Him. Electronic device." She smells impossibly like a freshly-cut lawn.

"Old-school dot-matrix printer. Comic strip character."

I am staring at her hands. Her fingernails are smooth shells against the stretched pink skin of her fingers. She drums them against the tabletop before answering, "Hagar the Horrible. Band."

I want to smooth her hair against her forehead, but we haven't touched since she came over today. "The Band. Animated character."

"Little John from Robin Hood. Action movie star."

"Charles Bronson. Do you want a popsicle?" I ask.

"What kind are they?"

"The fruit ones. Where they use real fruit."

"What kind of fruit?"

"Pineapple."

"Sure."

I walk into the kitchen and get two popsicles and while I'm in there it begins to rain outside. Looking down at the popsicle wrappers in the trashcan, I become convinced that if I had been in the living room when it started raining Lucy and I would be having sex right now. Her dad died two weeks ago. That's when it started. It's not very hard to see it for what it is.

When I walk back into the living room Lucy is standing outside on the front porch watching the rain. I stand behind her and place my chin on her shoulder. I can feel her shoulder blade on my chest. She has huge shoulder blades, big coasting curves out of her back. She shrugs my head off her shoulders and takes the popsicle from me.

"I've never seen a tornado," she says. "I always wanted to."

"Tornado season is pretty much over," I say, "but maybe we'll get lucky and one will come."

"That," she says, "would be something." She steps forward, away from me, and sticks her hand out into the rain.