UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL WITH EL NINO

UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL WITH EL NIÑO

Stories from Kennyland must be getting noticed. I received an email from a stranger who’d been reading my blog posts:

“Hi Kenny — we have a Facebook friend in common who’s been forwarding your stories. They thought you’d be perfect for a project I have in mind. Meet me tomorrow at 10am at the Starbucks on El Paseo. I’ll be wearing a bucket hat. Name’s Cumulous. You’ll recognize me — I’m a tad misshapen and pale.”

I had nothing better to do, so I said yes.

I spotted Cumulous the moment I walked in. Bucket hat, roundish frame, cargo pants, and a t-shirt that read “I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now” on a blue and white background. He was nursing what appeared to be a venti something — a drink so large it had its own weather system.

I sat down with my coffee. He skipped pleasantries.

“I’m the PR agent for someone taking a lot of heat lately. I thought you could interview my boss and help turn the narrative around. Your stories have the right tone — quirky, accessible, non-threatening. My client needs all three right now.”

Why me? I asked.

He fixed me with a mildly annoyed look. “Because you’re the one sitting at the computer writing this. It’s your idea. So I suggest you keep writing.”

Fair point. I continued.

He offered to take me to meet his boss — a ten-minute drive. I climbed into a beautifully restored 1936 Lincoln Zephyr, all chrome and cream leather, the kind of car that made you feel important just sitting in it. At his request, I pulled a black hood over my head. I briefly considered whether this was a terrible idea. Then I remembered I had no afternoon plans and settled in.

When he removed the hood, we were standing in the desert. Nothing but scrub and sand, and a large, once-thriving warehouse that had gone completely to seed. The building had the look of something that had witnessed better decades and simply given up trying. Paint peeled from its flanks like sunburned skin. A sign above the loading dock — whatever it once said — had lost enough letters to be illegible, which felt appropriate.

Before entering, he handed me a clear raincoat, rubber boots, and a bucket hat. You’ll see why, he said.

The hallway squished underfoot with every step, the carpet thoroughly saturated with something I chose not to investigate. The back room was a mess of palm fronds, plastic bottles, broken wood, car parts, and standing puddles — all arranged with the casual randomness of disaster. A shopping cart had somehow ended up wedged between a refrigerator door and what looked like the roof rack of a Subaru. Nobody had called for either of them. They were just there, as debris tends to be — uninvited, unexplained, and weirdly permanent.

Yet within the wreckage there was an eerie stillness, as though the violence that had scattered these objects had long since moved on to ruin someone else’s week.

Sitting on the floor in the middle of it all was a boy — maybe twelve — spinning a globe. Longish hair, jeans, flip flops, and a long-sleeve shirt printed with the postal motto: Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays me from the swift completion of my appointed rounds.

The irony of that shirt on that kid, in that room, was not lost on me.

Cumulous read my expression. “My boss,” he said. “El Niño. Have a good interview.” He left, closing the door with a soft click that felt far too casual given the circumstances.

It took a moment to absorb. This boy — this globe-spinning, flip-flop-wearing twelve-year-old — was responsible for droughts, crop failures, historic floods, tsunamis, and a category of chaos that had its own name on every weather map on earth. Meteorologists whispered it. Insurance adjusters dreaded it. Farmers watched the skies for it. And here I was, alone with him, armed with nothing but a notepad and a half-finished coffee, trying to make him likeable.

I swallowed hard and started talking.

How should I address you?

Just call me El.

Okay, El. Why all the weather? The droughts, the heat, the flooding?

I don’t know. It’s fun.

Fun? How is loss of life fun?

My therapist said it’s a healthy outlet for anger.

You have a therapist?

ADHD and anger issues. Chemical imbalance. She’s actually very good. We do EMDR on Tuesdays.

I… okay. Has it ever occurred to you that destroying coastlines is maybe not the healthiest coping strategy?

You sound like my mother.

What does your mother say?

She says I need to channel my energy more constructively. She suggested painting. I tried it. I painted a flood. She didn’t think that was the point.

Fair. So what triggers the episodes?

Cloud seeding.

That’s pretty rare.

I know. But the trauma lingers. Someone sticks a needle in a cloud without asking and suddenly I’m spinning out over the Gulf of Mexico for six weeks. Does that seem proportional to you? No. But here we are.

And Cumulous — who exactly is he?

Beverly Hills talent agency. He says I’ve got a powerful act and could break into disaster films. He’s gotten me some press, but no roles yet, so I’ve been doing my own thing. I’m on every channel now — but it’s all negative. They paint me as a monster. Dramatic music, red radar maps, that guy in the rain gear standing in front of a highway sign that says TURN AROUND DON’T DROWN. I didn’t make that sign. That was already there.

Still, people are losing homes.

I know. I feel bad about that. Genuinely. I cry afterward, but by then everyone’s already filed their FEMA claims and nobody’s interested in hearing that I feel remorseful. The news cycle moves fast. Cumulous said you could help change the story before the next cycle starts.

Why me? I asked again.

El looked up from his globe. The continent of Australia rotated slowly under his finger. He studied it for a moment, like a kid deciding where to spend his allowance.

“Hey,” he said. “You are writing a story with no clear ending that’s been going on too long. The dialogue’s starting to meander. I thought I should point that out”

He spun the globe one more time and let it slow to a stop. His finger landed somewhere in the South Pacific. He smiled faintly — not the demonic grin from earlier, something quieter. Almost tired.

“I don’t actually enjoy all of it,” he said, so softly I almost missed it. “Sometimes I just don’t know how to stop.”

I wrote that down.

Plot point taken.

I bade El Niño goodbye and saved the file. He wasn’t wrong about any of it — the meandering, the lack of resolution, the sense that the story had set out somewhere without knowing exactly where it was going. But maybe that’s fitting. El Niño doesn’t know where he’s going either, half the time. He just moves, warm and restless, across open water, and waits to see what he becomes when he arrives.

I’ll be back when I figure out the ending. He probably will be too.

© 2026 Kenneth Kates