Wreckage

It was like the world ended, right there, in this dark, dusty basement. We were completely lost now. Before we could at least hear the news coming in and out from our handcrank radio. We listened to the storm coverage describing the horrifying remains of our county. Buildings collapsed, neighborhoods flattened, flash floods blocking roads, and long lists of missing persons.

Now, it’s broken for good. E swore he could get a clearer signal, but an hour ago we were condemned to true, utter silence.

Since then we’ve been sitting on a single cot in the storm cellar wrapped in blankets. I barely know E, or why his name is only one letter. Our meeting was happenstance, moments before the storm that was supposed to hit later that night swept in early.

We were both at the local marketplace, the only source of produce in our rural town. I was collecting storm essentials when I accidentally bumped into him, stepped on his shoe and knocked over a bucket of apples—which I ended up bruising and purchasing.

E helped me pick up the apples and offered to carry them back to my apartment. I tried to refuse, but he insisted, and on the walk down the empty dirt road we debated what to do with so many apples.

“I’m thinking applesauce,” I said. “Maybe I could sell it.”

“You can make more money selling apple cider,” E said.

“I don’t know how to make apple cider. Don’t you need a cider press or something?”

He laughed. “I don’t know. You’re the one who bought 25 dollars worth of apples.”

The rain started not even halfway home. At first, a light pitter-patter and within minutes it turned into a torrential downpour. The sky turned a gray-green and the clouds seemed to be churning above us. It only took two minutes to soak us down to the bone.

“I know a place nearby,” E shouted to me through the sheet of rain. Out on the country dirt road, there wasn’t even a tree to stand under. “Maybe we can wait this out.”

I briefly debated the idea of going to an unnamed place with a stranger, but as the wind picked up and the rain continued to pelt me as if it was moving sideways, I decided I’d be risking my life either way. We ran through the muddied street and I followed him as he led us through a wire fence and across a field towards a barn.

He ditched the bag of apples on the ground as soon as we came under the roof. It was old and a bit of rain leaked through, dripping onto the mix of dirt and hay making up the floor. But it was better than being out there.

“We have a problem,” E declared a few minutes later, his eyes trained on the sky. The rain had let up and the wind had stalled. An eerie calm fell over the field, only the sound of our breathing to be heard.

The tornado sirens blared the next moment.

E let out a string of curse words and gathered the two grocery bags I had set on a hay bale. “We need to get to the cellar.”

I didn’t question him as a low roar began to vibrate against the bleating of the sirens. He led me out of the barn, down the field several feet and stopped at a giant metal door in the ground. Yanking it open proved to be difficult and I waited anxiously, on the look out for funnel clouds and debris.

Once it was open, he told me to get inside and I quickly descended halfway down the wooden stairs. He came in after me, slamming the metal door shut above us.

Another step down the wooden stairs and my leg dropped through space as a loud crack echoed. I caught myself on the railing, holding myself up as the snapped wood of the step stabbed into my bare thigh.

“Shit, hang on,” E said into the darkness. With the door closed, it was pitch black.

“I’m stuck,” I said, panting and trying to maneuver my leg out of the hole with no success. Pain laced through my leg, white and hot at the edges of my vision.

A light clicked on, a small circle of it coming from the flashlight in E’s hand. He kneeled on the step below me and placed a hand on my thigh, right above where a wooden shard was jabbing into my skin so hard it punctured. Blood trickled from the wound.

“We’re gonna get you out,” he told me calmly. As if I was a child with my hand stuck in a candy dispenser.

In time, we did manage to remove my leg from the broken stair. E performed first-aid as I lay on a cot, my soaked clothes clinging to me uncomfortably. Removing the shards of wood was the most painful. Then he pressed some kind of cloth to the affected area and wrapped it in what I think is a sheet.

I closed my eyes for a moment, needing to clear my head and process what was happening. A storm, a cellar, a boy. A throbbing pain in my left thigh.

When I woke, there was a flashlight shining in my face. “Hey.” It was E, of course. Through a haze I watched him as he sat on the end of the cot. “Do you know your name?”

I tried to register his question in my brain. To find the answer hiding behind the fog. “Lira Margaret Brimm.”

“Damn,” E said softly, “I don’t even know if you’re right.” He sighed and lowered the light so it illuminated the floor. “Lira it is.”

A loud, thunderous sound bellowed through the space. Something pelted the shut metal doors, making the damp cellar all the more terrifying.

“What’s going on up there?” I asked, pushing myself to my elbows.

“There was definitely a tornado,” he said with a nod of his head. “ I think the rest of the storm is hitting us now.”

“It wasn’t supposed to hit until tonight,” I argued, as if that would change anything. It didn’t.

Eventually, E found a handcrank radio and spent ages winding it up for a few minutes of staticky news. We could hear bits and pieces of radio stations—tornado damage, high speed winds, flash floods, shelter in place.

For what I counted as about three hours we had some access to news on the storm’s progression. Every half-hour or so E cranked the radio again so we could listen in. Then he broke it beyond repair and for the last hour we’ve had no way of knowing anything. He talks to pass the time, telling me unimportant stories about stupid things he did in high school and asks me questions about my life.

“I think it’s safe to go back up,” E suddenly declares into the darkness. His weight shifts as he stands from the cot. “I’ll see what’s going on.”

With his flashlight in front of him, he carefully climbs up the broken stairs and pushes on the metal cellar doors. But no light shines through, not even a sliver.

“I hate to ask since you’re hurt,” E calls from the steps. “But can you come up here? I think there’s something blocking the doors.”

It takes me a minute to limp across the space, the wound in my thigh shooting pain throughout my whole body, and then crawl up the stairs. E helps me up and pulls me to standing on the top step.

“I only need you to stand and push this door for a minute,” he tells me. “If you can do that, we can get out of here and get you treated properly.”

I nod, knowing it’s going to hurt and brace myself. “On the count of three.”

“One,” he says.

“Two,” I say.

“Three,” is covered by groaning as we push the door with all of our strength. The door lifts slightly, just enough to feel like we’re going to knock off whatever is laying atop the slanted door, and then we lose it. The door slams back into place and I sink down against the wall. E keeps trying but the door doesn’t budge again.

Thirty minutes later, in utter defeat and exhaustion, we return to the cot. Our clothes and hair are in a state of half-dry, half-damp thanks to the wet chill of this cellar, neither of our phones have a signal, and my thigh feels like it’s on fire. I start to cry.

“Hey, hey, hey,” E says softly when he notices and puts an arm around my shoulders. “Lira, it’s going to be fine. I’ll go back up there and bang on the door until someone hears us. Don’t worry.”

Through my blurry vision I look at him lit by the soft light of a lantern. He’s got dark wavy hair and his eyes are a gray-green, like the color of the sky before a storm.

I don’t know why I do it. I don’t even let the thought linger before I lean across the space between us and kiss him. At first he’s surprised, but then he sinks into it, pulling me a little closer with his arm around me.

A scenario plays in my mind, what it would have been like if we had made it back to my apartment this afternoon. Twenty more minutes and we would have made it to my building where I would have buzzed us in. The steps to the third floor take a while to climb—the elevator is temporarily out of service.

“You can come in if you want,” I say to E as he stands there holding a paper bag of bruised apples.

He smirks. “I was tempted to watch you try to carry up all these apples by yourself.” The smirk changes into a soft smile. “But if you insist.”

We walk up the stairs—round and round the never ending flights—until we stop at the gray door marked with a 3. Down the hall past 9 doors we reach mine.

I fumble for the apartment key and manage to unlock the door. We both stumble through, the weight of the groceries killing our arms. I set my bags on the dining room table, then accidentally kick the bag of apples E had just set on the floor, sending them scattering once again.

E raises his brows at me and laughs. “You have a knack for knocking over apples.”

The heat on my cheeks comes off red, I know it. Embarrassed, I turn to the kitchen and grab the tea kettle. I don’t bother with the apples. “Do you want tea?”

E glances at the floor now covered in fruit bruised purple and blue. He doesn't pick them up either. “Sure. What do you got?”

I fill the kettle with water and set it on the stove. Above the fridge, I reach for my two tins of tea. “Chamomile and Pomegranate. Sorry, kind of girly.”

This makes E chuckle. “I like pomegranate.” He walks closer to me and bumps his hip into mine. “So, if these teas are girly, what tea do men drink?” His voice is soft, like a whisper. The warmth of his breath is on my cheek. I want to kiss him.

“I don’t know,” I say quietly and bite my lip. “Earl Grey?”

“You are so damn cute, you know that?”

“I know,” I say, unboxing two pomegranate tea bags. Outside my third story window, the sky begins to shift into a dark, stormy gray. “Do you want to stay for the storm?” I ask him. “We can play Uno by candlelight when we lose power.”

E moves towards me, leaning one arm on the counter. “Romantic,” he says. Then he kisses me and I don’t stop him.

I kiss him back as his lips press into mine. Our bodies pull closer to one another and soon we are on my dingy green couch. I can feel the dip in the cushions from the weight of our bodies. E’s hands are around my waist, mine in his dark hair. He moves his lips from my own to my jaw and then my neck.

Every single touch is electrifying. I don’t ever want him to stop.

He pulls his lips back up to mine and this time his kiss is hungrier. My hands run down his broad shoulders. I break away from his kiss to catch my breath. Within a moment he brings me back, digging his fingers into my skin.

The tea kettle screams.

E pulls away from me in one sharp motion. “It’s okay,” I mutter. “I have to get the tea.”

“Shh,” E pulls away from me. I open my eyes to find myself back in the utterly dark basement, on a threadbare cot.

There’s an alarm going off somewhere. It’s not my tea kettle. It’s not a tornado siren. Scraping and pounding sounds are going on above us, less like the roar of the storm and more like the clambering of tools.

E bounds up the stairs again. He pushes against the door, still stuck, and then begins to pound. “Help!” he shouts. “Help, we’re stuck!”

Minutes pass. Minutes and minutes and the alarm is still going off and somebody is out there. They have to be. Finally, small streams of light shine down the stairs onto E. And then, the door is wide open.

“I’m Daniel Erickson,” I hear E tell someone. “We got trapped in here during the storm. There’s a woman with me, Lira Brimm, she’s injured.”

I wish I knew what would have really happened if E and I had made it back to my apartment. Maybe he would have been mine for a while. Maybe forever. Maybe not at all. I don’t know what exists between us now and I shouldn’t care.

E comes back and helps me hobble up the stairs into the field we’d crossed only hours ago. The barn we’d taken shelter in earlier is now in pieces. Debris is strewn across the large field—broken outdoor furniture, fencing panels, tractor tires, chunks of metal and wood and plaster—items that must have travelled miles to end up here.

I’m loaded into the passenger side of a pick-up truck that slowly makes its way through the wreckage to the nearest shelter where someone can have a look at my thigh. It’s not the most pressing injury, I’m sure of it, but E insisted I get it checked out. And in all honesty, the pain is only getting worse.

I don’t see E again. Not the first day in the shelter where a woman running a first-aid table checks my wound. Not the second day when emergency help arrives and a professional tells me it’s infected. Not the third day when I end up in a sterile white room at the hospital with no one by my side.

I can’t find him. I know he isn’t here, but I look anyway. I look everywhere. My injury has been cared for and I’m going to be heading home. Ms. Jones, my neighbor in the apartment building, is going to pick me up now that a road has been cleared between the nearest hospital and our rural town.

After the nurse checks me out, I take the elevator down to the ground floor. The doors open to a bustling hallway of blue laminate flooring and I walk, following the signs for the parking lot. My cell phone has been dead for days so I have no way of knowing when Ms. Jones will arrive. I called her from a hospital phone a few hours ago and asked her to get here as soon as she safely could.

The automatic doors slide open and closed as people come in and out. I keep my head down and aim for the bench near the doors where I plan to wait. Before I reach it, the doors slide open and a man walks through, catching my eye.

“Lira,” the man says and for a moment, I don’t believe it’s him. Then our eyes meet and I realize I’m not imagining things. It’s him. It’s E. His eyes have shifted into more of a leafy green now as opposed to the stormy gray. He smiles and I can’t help but smile back.

“What are you doing here?” I ask, stepping closer to him. He doesn’t appear to be injured.

“Came to pick you up,” he says, a shy sort of smirk playing on his lips. “Ms. Jones was telling everyone about you being at the hospital. I volunteered to come.”

Without any warning, I throw my arms around his neck and bring him in for a hug. His arms come around my back, holding me against him as I let out a breath of relief. We weathered a storm together and I know there’s a reason why. If I’d stayed back in my apartment alone, I would have been okay. If I’d been walking home alone when the storm hit, I might not have made it at all.

“E,” I say softly, “you saved my life. I don’t know how to thank you.”

We move out of the hug but he leaves his hands around my waist, not letting me go too far. “Let me drive you home.”

Our hands lace together and we get into his truck, which luckily survived the storm. On the drive, he tells me that the tornado essentially threw his trailer across town and he lost everything. He had parked his truck near the market and decided to walk me home, which is the only reason it is currently intact. “So you see,” he tells me as we drive the highway, windows down and country music playing quietly on the radio, “you saved my life, too.”