Sparkling Escapades Abroad with the Fairy Bra Mother

The sky had been restless all week,
three watches in seven days—
and I have never been one
to trust a storm.

Not since I was ten in Mississippi,
watching a tornado in our yard,
spinning straight toward home—
until my mother prayed
and it bent its path,
taking only our shed
and leaving our lives.

Not since Texas at fifteen,
when a mile-wide monster
cut a scar through town.
Or the night in that trailer house,
when the wind pressed so hard
the curtains breathed in and out
like lungs against the windows,
rain slipping through the seams,
and afterward—
fabric trapped where it didn’t belong,
like the storm had reached inside.

This week I had been braver,
or maybe just tired—
until the watch turned warning
and something deep in me whispered,
not this one.
A weight settled in my chest,
quiet but certain.

And then—
a knock of fate in the driveway.
The hatchery driver,
there with eggs and routine,
caught in something far from ordinary.

Warnings lit up—Osage, then Riceville—
and I remember thinking
about him heading back out,
hoping he’d outrun what was coming.

The road grew busy, uneasy,
like the world knew before we did.

We thought about leaving,
but where do you go
when the sky is the danger?

So we rode instead.
And the story unfolded—
a tornado touching down
just miles away,
tearing tin from a building,
crossing fields like it had purpose,
sliding over Jade Avenue
while watchers stood witness.

They saw it—
the spinning, the violence,
the truck caught in its grip,
flipping and flipping
like it weighed nothing at all.
He remembers only gray—
the world erased in an instant—
and then silence in a ditch.
Somehow,
the truck righted itself,
mud everywhere—
inside, outside,
on him, around him—
as if the earth itself
had tried to claim him
and then let go.

And I keep thinking—
about prayers that bend storms,
about breath against glass,
about how quickly everything
can turn.

Can you imagine that ride?