Jason Everett Morris -- The Future of Horror

When it was time, he clamped his fist around his daughter’s arm, but in detecting no resistance, he instead cradled her palm delicately within his own. She nodded, and obeyed, and Father guided his pure, teenage child up the storm shelter’s steps and out into the open air.

“Go on. Don’t be afeared now.”

Black farm soil whirled in a monstrous, cylindrical tower up and up and up—a perfect spiral of purgatory-dark extending into the heavens. It undulated, a billion stacked rings howling in choral-spinning unison. The earth’s mouth from which the girl emerged rested at the focal eye of all radii.

“Barry, don’t! Please!” Mother cried. “She ain’t what—” She reached, and Father planted his elbow into the fool woman’s jaw.

“Go on, little girl. I told you.” He kept his dear heart’s hand so she minded her step against the wind kicked into her eyes.

The tornado withheld tin sheet roofing, floor timbers compoundly fractured, and all the family’s earthly possessions that constituted home. It proffered it all back to them, demands enunciated in a throaty roar somewhat like words, but it did so only conditionally.

“Daddy?” Pin-prickled wind slapped color into her cheeks and hoisted her Sunday dress up to indecency.

Mother grasped desperately again and was shoved underground to her other babies, hands ready to catch, wails giving chorus.

“Go on now, Mae. They’ll fly you.”

Father released her hand. She shuffled a short distance, then again. Timpani reverberated in her ears as she squinted into the eddy and waited to do her duty to God and family—

The jerk of her body was quick and gracefully subtle. It was the sigh of some weather-rusted bolt kicked off a tractor drum a generation ago, now made into a bib of drizzling rubies.

“Mae? Dearest Father in Heaven—Mae?”

Mother finally pushed past her man. It was easily done, for he gave no resistance, not while staring at the gusts languidly marionetting his daughter. Mother thought the Lord would take mercy on the poor fool, surely, for farmer men only knew from biblical things. Abraham and Isaac. Not their fault.

Only a mother understood what meaning lay behind another mother’s words.

A fixed shape waited within the wall of storm, a silhouette of distinct head and torso but vacant as a breeze otherwise. The airy mother cradled a swathed bundle to her breast.

The women approached, dipped their heads in silent respect. Arms outstretched—one of flesh and one not—the bundle was accepted without question or goodbye. The thing inside was blue as the sky, but as it sucked its first coughing breath, color came into her cheeks.

On the instant, the winds were hushed. Their home returned to earth in an explosion of cracked beams and shattered glass. A rain of black farm soil washed them. And the only howling was that of a father over his dear heart.