In Kansas, there are no large bodies of water. There are small ponds, creeks, ditches, man-made lakes, puddles. So, when Kansas children dream themselves out of being landlocked, they dream they live on boats all their lives, waiting for fathers, who swim out in the water to catch water moccasins. The fathers bring the snakes home to the children in woven baskets, some dead, some still alive and so poisonous the children have to instantly take the snakes in their small hands and twist the necks until the writhing stops. They wrap them around their wrists, tying them off—the only jewelry for children eternally boated. They skin what they aren’t wearing, lay the thin, muscled bodies out in the sun, covered in layers of saltwater, and watch from under the shade of their boat’s roof, waiting to eat.
In Kansas, the sky is bigger than any other location in North America. It’s the geographical center of the United States, lacking mountains, tall trees, and other obstructions, so if you lie on your back in a field, spread your arms, and look up, you will see God if you wait long enough. There are more stars in a Kansas sky, more opportunities to wish on them, sending out your dreams into the universe, but with so much open space, dreams float into the sky, themselves becoming luminescent as they get lost, and eventually people wish on them, mistaking them for stars, so the loss of dreams is cumulative.
The children can, like so many Kansas children, become orphans, and live the majority of their lives as adolescent nymphs underwater. They can spend eternities hiding under moss-covered rocks and decayed plants, dodging the gaping mouths of fish. Then, some glorious summer day, they are allowed to emerge and take to the air, shedding through to winged form. As soon as they take their first unsure flight, the dark-eyed birds are swooping down beak-first toward them, and the fish jump up from below the surface. If they can make it this far—usually a couple of hours—then the children get to transform yet again—this time into more streamlined bodies—thinner, wings stronger, with no mouths or stomachs, no eyes, and they have around thirty final minutes to blindly skim the flesh of the water’s surface, in search of the loves of their lives before they starve to death.
***
I always wanted to fly—not necessarily away from anything, but just to be airborne was enough. I could rise above our small destitute house and look down on the other children scurrying across the the fields between open doors. Sometimes flight was an out-of-body experience. I would float above myself in the alleyway, watching the older neighbor boy who put his penis in my mouth behind the dumpsters, and further up until I could see my stepfather Dick and my mother sitting on our porch, smoking cigarettes and swatting mosquitoes.
My extreme desire to fly wasn’t just from watching the birds bobbing through branches in the trees or the moths fluttering around false moons in the night, it also stemmed from the fact that I could fly, sometimes. The first time, when I was in the back of a car, young enough to still need a car seat, I looked directly at the sun. My mother saw me staring when she strapped me in and told me to stop or I’d go blind, but I did not stop, and as we pulled away, for a moment, I trailed the car from above with my eyes on the sun. I couldn’t see anything, but that didn’t stop me from feeling the sensation of flight, of weightlessness. When I looked away from the sun, I was back in my body. Other times I flew in dreams—not that I dreamt I was flying but that I was flying while I dreamt.
I thought the sun was the key to flight, but I could not fly on demand, no matter how hard I tried. I would climb trees to the highest branch I could reach, sometimes jumping off while trying to keep my eye on the fiery sun through the leaves, but I only flopped to the ground. I learned a kind of empathy for the tendency of bodies to obey the laws of gravity, to sink downward, falling like an overripe peach with a violent, meaty thump.
I tried prayer, asking God, please, if you love me, let me fly now. It wasn’t just flight I wanted in these moments, but proof of God’s love too. But it was utterly futile—no matter how badly I wanted it, I could not fly at will. So, I began cursing God, who had given me flight before, and yet withheld when I needed it.
I’d move my chapped lips tensely over clenched teeth, whispering to God that I hated him, that if he wanted me to love him and follow him then he needed to grant me flight. Later, though, I thought the denial was beautiful—the red passion of anger and streaks of hatred across my face sought to be honored for what they formed in the soft meat of my being.
The first prayer I knew was the serenity prayer—I learned it from the AA meetings my mother took us to when we were children. I viewed it as a transactional affair. We asked God for something that we could only gain from him, and, if we asked vigilantly enough, he gave it to us.
***
The clouds become more dense—like slow, heavy objects they rolled across the sky, which darkened, and yet looked as if it were glowing from within, because the sun had all but abandoned us, only indirectly illuminating the heavens. When these types of storms manifested, sometimes it would rain, but mostly time existed as if suspended in the moment right before the downpour. We waited, paying attention to the wind blowing, listening for sirens. The clouds would meet, swirl, and we wondered, will this be the one to touch down?
Mom would stand on the porch, usually with a coffee mug, always with a cigarette. She did not fear tornados. She’d look straight in the eye of the vortex and let it rip her apart before fearing it. The reverence we all felt for a tornado was religious, and tornado weather wasn’t just a time to be afraid, but a time to reflect on what we had to lose, and what we did not.
“Ain’t nothing to stop a tornado,” she said, coffee mug and cigarette both in one hand, the other hand in her pocket. “No point in being afraid of something you can’t control.”
My little sister Marcella and I would sit on the porch with our mother—we both secretly hoped for a tornado. The storms caused it to hail in the middle of the summer. We’d watch the ice falling out of the sky in July, denting the hoods of cars, sometimes falling so hard, so big, we couldn’t leave the porch until it was over. Then, in the leftover chaos, we’d walk through like rats after the apocalypse, and compete to see who could find the biggest hailstone.
When it seemed safe, Dick would take us in the car to look at the damage around town—tree branches knocked across roads, power lines down, a general state of disorder as if we had been warned. In the car, we hoped the winds would pick back up, because since we were already out, Dick would follow the storm.
The cows cluster before a tornado, lumbering in from the fields.The birds go silent, they disappear deep into the trees as far away as they can get. Horses buck and whinny in their stalls, dogs bark and jump frantically, scratching at closed doors. They know before us when something is coming.
We unplugged everything from the walls—protection against lightning striking and ruining what few electronics we had. The jolt could enter our houses through the wires and fry us.
A tornado is smart. We heard stories about how a twister can pick you up while you’re still in your bed and sit you down two miles away, unharmed. It can pick and choose which houses to take out, which ones to leave, often one right next to another.
Sometimes when we got scared, mom would tell us to go lie in the bathtub. She didn’t want us hiding in the basement because she didn’t believe it would really save us. At most, we might be trapped under the debris and die, buried alive. When the glass of the windows shook in their frames violently enough, mom put us in the tub and laid a mattress over the top. We hid in the shadows, whispering, do you think it’s coming?
Mom said we lived in a valley, so we were safe—a tornado would not touch down here. Towns nearby, within an hour’s drive, were wiped out, but we usually only got the residual winds. I wanted it to take us, everyone. It wasn’t just The Wizard of Oz that made me want the tornado. I wanted it to come and take us all away, drop us down in a land with little people, with lions, with poppies, a land where our biggest fear was a witch. A witch I could face, a witch I understood. The rest of our lives were so small in the face of a funnel forming in the sky, its power evident in the flashes of lightning trapped inside. We were nothing, and we would be shown we were nothing. I wanted to be nothing.