Thunderstorms 101
That red alert dot on your weather app? That’s us. As a couple, we’re textbook toxic. Our bitter resentment and anger churning up the atmosphere. Expect torrents, damaging winds. Lightning, striking thrice times in some cases. We’ll pick our teeth with the wire bones of your Walmart umbrellas.
We have a chemistry, but it has become corrosive. Exhibit A. I get fired from work last month, am glumming around the house, and she says, is there anything I can do to help? I say, I don’t know, are you a beer? We lift each other down. The one star ratings for compatibility are going off like cartoon fireworks above us. Shit, there goes a powerline. Lately, I’m only happy when Shirley Manson rains.
Cookouts with neighbors ruined. We bring rain, others a passing dish. Restaurant guests in our path look down at their pastas, faces stung in a hailstorm of our open air feuding. A swath of collateral damage piles up in our wake: family get togethers, flooded with tension, ravaged as we upend picnic tables, driving people indoors, fleeing, when all they want is to luxuriate in the out of doors. We can’t take us anywhere. As we blow further away from what once held us together, it has become a classic case of he said, she said you promised me, YOU PROMISED you were good with our decision.
It begins with broken hearts. With a deeply loved dog having a violent seizure and biting off a chunk of his tongue. With him thrashing on the floor, trying to stand but falling. An old dog of 15 with nicknames like Tiny Gramps and Dudebuddy who smells sweet like Cheerios. It begins with thousands of dollars’ worth of tests we can’t afford at the animal emergency hospital. With an MRI showing brain lesions that could forecast more seizures, but maybe could be managed with medication. With one person, after much back and forth not just about costs, but quality of life, convincing the other, it’s best to say goodbye. It begins with using an in-home euthanasia service and watching him carried out in a basket like the old baby he was. It begins, in the weeks following, with guilt, with second-guessing, with growing resentment, all colliding like moisture and unstable air into the firm belief something unforgiveable has been done.
In his diary, Kafa wrote: a cage goes in search of a bird. Our situation feels like more of a cage went in search of a cage scenario—and they found each other. Is that a shape? Two cages mangled together into one? I have seen thunderhead clouds that look like that. We’re our own brand of weather porn, attracting gawkers, onlookers, storm chasers, and the like; the spectacle of our collapse, quite the money shot. Our public displays of anti-affection end up on their phones, pushed out to the masses. We are on everyone’s doppler. Cows fold themselves up like lawn chairs and lie down in fields. Birds fly low. Insects seek shelter. Humans buy 12-packs of Angel Soft. Was that a transformer exploding?
As a supercell system, we could be forever. Word boner enthusiasts love that there is a word, petrichor, for that earthy smell the ground gives off when it finally rains after a dry spell. There is also a smell the world gives off when your wife convinces you to say goodbye to your dog, when you realize you might just resent her for it forever. He was walking, eating, smiling. Is that not living? All my passwords are his name, plus the year we got married. Jesus, what happened to all those blue skies.
Mini-interview with Keith Woodruff
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
KW: My first son Rainer (yes after the poet) died as an infant. Lived six weeks. That was in 1998 and for years it was all I wrote about really. Especially a lot of haiku because the short form felt like all I could attend to and I wrote this particular haiku about holding a wet egg just laid by a chicken and it became a flash/prose poem piece that some awesome editor named Scott Garson published and that kind of rocked my world and really inspired me to explore flash more.
HFR: What are you reading?
KW: Ghosts of You by Cathy Ulrich, The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus, Leila Chatti’s book of poetry Wildness Before Something Sublime … one of the poems ends: “My God. How lucky to have lived a life I would die for. Isn’t that just amazing?” Lastly, not reading it yet, but am very much looking forward to Jeffrey Hermann’s full length collection.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “Thunderstorms 101”?
KW: Ah, it was very much saying goodbye to our dog last year. Tiny Gramps, Dudebuddy … we had a lot of nicknames for him, but his actual name was Otty and he was a beautiful little Border Terrier. That part of the piece is fairly on the money, accurate.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
KW: I have been writing poetry for a lot longer than flash and microfiction, so I am currently working on developing my craft around shorter fictions. I have a chapbook in the works—it’s a blend of prose poems and shorties. Thanks to everyone out there who went before me and created a place for these kind of hybrid collections.
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
KW: I was in this little independent bookstore the other day and they had a board of stickers you could purchase. One read “Radicalized by Basic Human Decency,” and the other said “I Could Really Go for Some Precedented Times.” I made them into fridge magnets. Those stickers speak to how I feel these days, even though I keep seeing bumper stickers that tell me to fuck my feelings.
Keith Woodruff lives in San Antonio, Texas, with a backyard full of moody tomato plants. His poetry has appeared in RHINO, The Journal, Sundog Lit, and New World Writing Quarterly. His short fiction appeared in Wigleaf, Bending Genres, JMWW, 100 Word Story, and is forthcoming in BULL, Does it Have Pockets?, Pithead Chapel, and Identity Theory. Read him in Best Small Fictions 2017, 2019, and at keithawoodruff.com. He was awarded a 2018 Pushcart Prize.
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