keyword: maelstrom, title: there is sometimes crying in baseball in misc. flash fiction

When I was a child, the building next door to us was hit by a tornado. Not next-door my home, thank Whoever, but next-door to the Cannonball Twin where I was watching “A League of Their Own” with my folks. A damn tornado hit the JCPenney’s next door, took out half the lot but all we knew inside the theater was a power surge melted the celluloid and then the lights went out. Eventually, the firemen rushed in, astonished that we hadn’t noticed and then the projectionist spliced it back together and the show went on, less a few frames of the lovely Geena Davis. The duplex is so close to the tracks, you see, we did hear noise over the din of Dolby sound, but we thought it just another roaring train. The Penney’s wrecked, the awning of the nearby steakhouse but a metal pretzel, yet somehow all we lost was a sliver of the female lead from “Beetlejuice”.

When I was in college, there were tornado warnings all across Syracuse, and the students were herded down into the basement of the dorm to wait the disaster out. Or, anyway, they tried to as I had slipped outside, I had missed a tornado once for the sake of Geena Davis, forever distracted as I am by leggy women, but not that time. I knew I was six-foot-five three hundred pounds, I knew that I could root myself to ground and see for my own eyes the harvest of the whirlwind.

I saw whole trees fly through the night-sky, as I had only ever seen before in movies. I saw the difficult-to-express-in-mere-words white-blue-white arcs of power transformers exploding on light-poles in the wake of our usually-absent God’s wrath. I felt rain pierce my arms like needles, I had the welts for weeks but all that I could do was laugh. Laugh like a damned maniac. Laugh that I got to see something so transcendent, just because I was large enough to absorb a smaller portion of the maelstrom. When I was finally soaked through, I sauntered past security guards too amazed I’d survived to narc me out to a resident-advisor. I figure that I looked crazy enough just then to not bother.

Today I’m damn near middle-aged, though, and now all I can think of are the state-fair workers who died in that same storm two miles away, and what an idiot I’d been to see entertainment in such devastation. Still, I had witnessed the luckier end of a miracle-catastrophe and lived to go see my film-history classes and still, it was goddamned amazing.

Someday, my devotion to witnessing the magic of this random scary sacred world will lead me to my end but I don’t think it will be by weather, we have been through too much together. My destruction will more likely be in failed pursuit of the masterpiece that is some six-foot woman with seven-foot long legs, not unlike as in those missing frames of Geena Davis.