Stormchaser

I am a fugitive in this world.

I don’t know how long I’ve been here exactly, but it feels like a lifetime. Being on the run, you lose track of time. I miss my friends, my family, even the town I grew up in. Fort Scott, Kansas was a landmark for being an important battle town during the civil war. Freedom fighters militarized the town and set up barracks and hospitals to aid in the war effort. Soldiers in Fort Scott protected Kansas’s southern flank and protected free blacks sent there for protection. Some of the freed men formed their own volunteer infantry, being some of the first black soldiers fighting to protect their freedom in America.

That was a long time ago. Nowadays, Fort Scott is a tourist trap and haven for conservatives looking to retire in a quiet, rural area. Despite the Christian ‘holier than thou’ attitude embedded in the culture and the constant reminder of our ancestors' moral fight, I often look back and miss it. Of course, I fuckin’ hated every minute I spent there as I was growing up, but you don’t really realize what you have until it’s gone. The brick streets and buildings seem so nostalgic now. They used to feel like red walls, creeping in on me more and more each year while my dreams slipped away through the cracks. The wheels of my skateboard would get stuck in between the bricks, throwing me to the ground and scraping my knees and the ambition from my heart. It felt like I’d never leave that tiny little town, but now there’s nothing I want more than to go back. 

Every time I look at the scars on my knees I’m reminded of what I took for granted. Mrs. Mayweather’s pottery shop on Mainstreet, the trolleys jingling by, the hot sun rising over the grassy hills on a warm summer morning. My mother used to take me out into town (which was really just one big street) and she’d get all of her shopping and running around done within a few blocks. In Fort Scott, you knew everybody and everybody knew you. As a teenager, I did not like that, as I’m sure you could imagine. I didn’t like all those old people asking me about my life and trying to be friendly. I wished that everyone would mind their own business and get out of mine. As I’m sure you can surmise by now, I miss them too. I miss them all.

The last time I was in Fort Scott I found myself in a look-alike facade. The bricks and trolleys all look the same. The town is alive with tourists taking pictures of the historical architecture and statues. All too familiar, but it’s wrong. Mrs. Mayweather’s pottery store is replaced with a yarn store. Close, but no Mayweather. Some young hippie named Jonas ran the yarn barn, as it was called. I didn’t like him. He smelt of marijuana and incense. Things can’t stay the same and they shouldn’t. In most cases, change is natural. This was anything but natural. In most cases, for a town to change as much as my Fort Scott did, it would take years. For me, it had been mere days.

This is not my Kansas; it’s someone else's. This is Jonas’ Kansas.

… 

The tornado hit down just outside Fort Scott at around 11:00 A.M. one Sunday morning. Church had just gotten out and the old people were starting to gather at the local Dennys for breakfast and coffee. My family owned a farm on the outskirts of town where we raised cows and chickens and grew wheat. I had slept in and was just then getting around to my Sunday chores. The chickens were going crazy as I tried to steal their eggs from them. They were usually quite friendly and docile, but that morning they screamed and pecked at me as soon as I entered their coop. Being groggy, it wasn’t until then that I noticed the sky. A large, low hanging wall of thick gray clouds was quickly filling the sky and covering up the blue sky and bright sun. 

I knew a storm was brewing, but I needed to finish my chores. I was already late and if I wasn’t finished by lunchtime, my father would have my ass.

Once I got to the cows, the sky was completely grey and the wind was picking up considerably. My shoulder-length hair was becoming unruly and it was hard keeping it out of my eyes. Dad always got on me for my hair. He’d say that a young man shouldn’t have hair as long as his mother. At that moment, knee-deep in cow dung and spitting out my own hair, I thought that maybe he was right. Despite it being early morning, the sky was almost as dark as night. The steel link fence surrounding the cow pen rattled violently in the wind. A cold chill ran down my spine and I shivered uncontrollably. 

Before I could escape from the storm and retreat back to my house, the wind became unruly. Dust and light debris like chicken feathers and hay started flying into the air. I took shelter with the cows, hoping that their shed could protect me from the flying particles. The old fence was the first thing to go. The steel posts ripped from the ground and sent even more dirt into the air. From my sequestering, I watched as the aluminum roofing was torn from the chicken coops. Their screams intensified as they were swept away. The Fence started flailing and slamming into the cow shack and they started bellowing as well.

No more than 50 yards away on the knoll overlooking our farm, the cone shape of the tornado passed the crest. It touched down and immediately the wind got worse. The posts from the fence started puncturing the thin wooden wall of the shed, making it look like swiss cheese. Strong wind flooded in through the holes displacing the hay from the floor and it was flung into my face. I dodged the poles, but the cows were not as fortunate. Their blood floated in the air and splattered all around the shed.

It wasn’t long before the shed was lifted from the ground and I with it. It was nothing like I’d ever felt before. I was terrified. At the same time, I felt weightless and free. Debris and the farm animals floated by me. A large piece of metal flew by me at an incredible speed, nearly chopping my head off. There was nothing I could do except hope and pray that I wouldn’t be hit by anything and killed. Maybe, possibly, I could be gently set back onto the ground once it was all over. Wishful thinking at best. The breath was stolen from my lungs like the eggs I’d stolen from the chickens moments before and my vision started to close in on me.

The winds drew me towards the center, the eye of the storm. Despite what I’d heard before, it was anything but calm. Once I reached it my limbs were pulled in all directions. It felt like they would be ripped from their sockets in no time. Before that could happen, the world around me went black. I figured that I was dead.

I awoke in the center of a cornfield. It did not look ravaged by a storm at all, the tall stalks surrounding me still stood tall. My body felt as if it had been thrown into a meat grinder and I was nothing more than a pile of ground-human. Despite this, it looked as if I had no broken bones. A majority of my skin was badly bruised, but I was alive. I remember wondering if I was in heaven, or if I’d somehow survived the tornado by some miracle. I reached the edge of the cornfield and did not recognize anything around me. All there were was dirt roads and more fields. I walked for a while until I reached a sign. It said: ‘Welcome to Troy. Population: 974’. 

I’d never been to Troy before, but I knew it was a long way from home. 

After that, I hitchhiked from town to town, only stopping once in Kansas City to spend the night in a homeless shelter for a bite to eat and a place to sleep. Once I finally arrived back in Fort Scott a few days after the storm, I found this sorry excuse for home. 

I walked up the uneven dirt path to my parent’s home around midday. I hesitantly knocked on the door and a middle-aged African American man answered the door who I did not recognize.

“Good Afternoon,” the man said. “How can I help you, son?”

“Hello, do you know anyone by the name of Mary or Jacob Barkley?” I asked.

“I’m afraid I don’t. Are you looking for them? They missing or something?”

“I guess you could say that,” I said, starting to turn and walk away. “Sorry to bother you, mister.”

“Hold up, son. What’s your name? I could call you if I see them. What’s your number or address?”

“I’m Jeremy Barkly, sir. I don’t really have a phone or home anymore I guess.” I didn’t know what to tell him. He was apparently living in what was my home.

“Are you alright, son? Can I help you in any way?”

“I appreciate that, sir, but I think I know what I need to do now. Have a good day.” I started to walk away from the house that looked exactly like mine, but wasn’t.

I looked back one last time and the man still stood in the doorway, giving me a perplexing look. “Take care of yourself, son,” he said.

My eyes started to water as I walked down the dirt road that looked like the one I’d ride my bike down almost daily. I dried my eyes with my sleeve and sniffed hard. This wasn’t time to get emotional. I needed to get home. 

… 

Since then, I’ve been traveling across tornado alley, chasing storms and attempting to replicate whatever took me from my home. I’m certainly no theoretical physicist, but my theory is that that tornado transported me somewhere very similar to my world, but that wasn’t the same. At first I thought it might have taken me forward in time a few years, but the year didn’t change. So that must mean that if I can somehow recreate the same situation that transported me before I have a chance of getting back to my world. I’ve jumped headfirst into three tornadoes so far and only wound up with broken bones and concussions; so that is a lot easier said than done.

The possibility that I could end up in another world altogether is not lost on me. Who's to say that there isn’t an infinite amount of universes that are only different in minute ways. On the other hand, there’s a chance that there are horrible worlds unlike mine in any way. Last year I would have laughed in your face if you told me that there were parallel realities, but now nothing is out of the realm of possibility. Hell, there could be worlds where the cold war turned into world war 3 or where vampires and demons are real. Maybe there’s a world without shrimp somewhere, or nothing but shrimp. I can’t really say for sure what is and isn’t possible, but I know that this isn’t the world that I was born in.

You could call it paranoia, but it’s as if people can tell that I don’t belong here. Maybe not consciously, but they treat me differently than they do each other. They stare just a bit longer. They talk with a nuanced bit of venom in their words. No one has outright accused me of being from a different reality, but it’s as if they somehow know. I can’t go to the supermarket or into a town center without snide side-eyes. I feel like the damn elephant man, but without the deformities. On many occasions I feel the urge to scream in their faces to stop staring at me, to treat me like a human being and not a freak, but they wouldn’t even know what I was talking about. It’s subconscious. Something down inside of them knows that I don’t belong, something they can’t possibly control.

At this point, I don’t care about the bruises and broken bones I may receive inside of a storm. I am a fugitive in this world, so I will chase every storm I can until I get home or it kills me.