Here’s what you do when everything’s gone. Your house your cars your books guitars your clothes devices memories pets your wife—your whole damn life. Gone. Sucked into a howling darkness so loud it’s still there when you close your eyes, the sky a vortex of unthinking death, an apocalypse overhead. How’d we even survive? you wonder, remembering the kids attached to your legs, still holding on like velcro stuffed animals. Your son your daughter keep asking, Where’s Mommy? Where’s Mommy? Hold them close, hug them tight. Kiss each soft precious cheek. Now they’re all you got, all you need, all you ever really had.

            Get your family safe before the sky tries to take them again. Look for shelter amid the flattened heaps of drywall and insulation, houses razed to bare concrete. Naked trees with twisted limbs, trunks snapped in half, bodies broken like martyrs of the Earth. A neighborhood of nothing. Just the sulfurous smell of a thousand lighting strikes.

            Tell your kids, Let's get the hell out of this godforsaken place.

            Take out your phone and see there's still service. Call your parents and find out the storm just missed them. They're coming to get you. Only a few miles away. Look online to see who else survived, any friends or neighbors in the local Bremen, KY Facebook group. Scroll past footage from the storm and find out this tornado was unlike anything before. Hundreds of miles of destruction across Arkansas and Missouri, devastation up through Tennessee and Kentucky. Dozens of people lost who couldn't get out in time. Everyone on Facebook's asking, Has anyone seen my husband my wife my brother my sister my child my parents my dog?

            There's a new group too, one just for the storm. Quad State Tornado Found Items. Folks post pictures of what the storm flung into their yard from God knows where. Knick-knacks, antiques, keepsakes. Stuff that ain't their stuff. So much stuff you can't stop scrolling through picture after picture hoping maybe something of yours isn't gone forever.

            Then you see a picture of yourself. Not you in your late thirties, filthy and tired and homeless. Not you as a widower but you as a smiling child. Glasses, backwards hat, adult teeth too big for your head. All the pictures from when you were a kid catching fish at the lake with your dad, tubing behind the pontoon, waving in a crowd at the annual pig roast potluck back in '98. Your memories all are there. Somebody found them, you can't believe it.

            Here's what you do when something's not gone. Message the woman who posted the pictures, Kathy, and come to find she lives in Louisville, a hundred miles up I-65. When your parents pull up in the old van, they can't believe it either. The pictures they gave you to show your kids. The memories they worked so hard to provide, proof you were loved. Pile in the van when your parents say, Let's go get our pictures back.

            Try not to look for your missing hometown on the drive. The church school ice cream shop post office liquor store gas station—the restaurant where you proposed to your wife—nothing's there. Nothing's where it's supposed to be.

            Ignore the upturned world until civilization returns. Arrive at Kathy's and marvel at her lovely colonial, not a scratch on it. Hug the older woman with outstretched arms who's so happy crying tears of joy to have found your leather-bound memories. Cry in the arms of someone you just met you're so damn thankful to have something left, something to pass on. Stand around and look at Kathy's fence where she found the pictures. Start wondering what fence in the world can protect your family from the clouds, from the howling freight-train sound behind your eyes.

            To stop Kathy's fence from reminding you of what's been lost, take out your phone and scroll again through Quad State Tornado Found Items. Refresh and pray, refresh and pray until you see something that can't be right, what looks like your guitar—the Surf Green Stratocaster from when you had the band. All the parties you played, so many good times. You haven't picked it up in months, but some guy named Mike posted your guitar on his living room couch, you can't believe it. Message him and learn he lives on the other side of Bremen. Say goodbye to Kathy and tell the kids, We're going to get Daddy's guitar. Head back toward home again, looking and praying, looking and praying, Please let there be more to be found.

            Get back to Bremen and see that Mike's modest ranch is battered but still standing. This side of town somewhat remains. Trees uprooted, roofs half-missing. Refrigerators in the street. Cars overturned and sideways in ditches. Mike says your guitar just came flying—shoo—right through his window. Sit on his couch and hold your beloved Strat, one broken string but otherwise fine, still playable. Strum a few out-of-tune chords. Think about jamming, getting the band back together. Keep strumming and hear a good chorus hook floating through your mind. Close your eyes and for a moment the sound of howling death's not there. Your voice sings, “Ya never kno-ow what's left to fi-ind,” but then the pressure in your ears returns and the ringing drowns out the tune and you start wishing it'd been you sucked into the sky, so much easier to fly away and die, easier than watching your life disappear, telling your kids Mommy's with the angels now don't cry my loves don't cry.  

            Put down the guitar that makes you feel too much. Get up and shake Mike's hand, and when he says, How about a cold one? you crack it and take a sip. Try to relax but don't stop your hand from taking out your phone. Don't stop looking. Should be grateful you're alive, your guitar your pictures your kids survived, what more could you want? But you keep looking and scrolling until your heart damn near stops when you see the cat—your family's fat orange tabby cat, Baggy. He's somehow still alive, wasn't smushed under that god-awful swirling cloud. Your neighbor Denice is holding all eighteen pounds of him right down your street.

            Grab the guitar and kids, thank Mike, and take off homeward, back through the wasteland of Bremen, back to what's been lost. Now you see it's all coming back, teddy bears and lawn mowers and wedding dresses—stuff all around. Get back to your street and find Denise waving. The kids are so happy petting and holding your purring little Baggy. The cat's somehow clean too, not a lick of dirt on him. You almost can't believe it, how the hell he could survive, just some fat little orange cat.

            Start believing they'll still find her. Your angelic wife, so kind and always putting the kids before herself, who went to get your daughter's favorite stuffed bunny she likes to hold when she's scared. Before your wife came back, the windows shattered and the walls started falling in, and right before the roof peeled off your house like the flimsy tin lid on a can of cat food, you got the kids to the basement and covered their heads and prayed, Oh please dear God let her make it let her make it. After it passed, you and the kids scrambled out the storm window and tried to look, tried to find her, but there was nothing but piles, endless piles. In your heart she's still there, the laugh that always makes you smile. Her perfect kissing lips. Never did leave the house without saying, Love you Babe. Love you.

            Pray one last time, Please God let me hear her say it.

            Here's what you do when maybe life's not gone after all, just flew away. You know she's there somewhere, so you start walking down the street through the flattened homes and mounds of detritus and trees stripped so savagely naked one's shivering and swaying toward you that's not a tree, it's her—clothes half-torn off her body, hair a messy nest of curls, the most gorgeous thing you've ever seen. She's crying and the kids scream, MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! and you run toward each other through the scraps and shards of the world. It's a miracle just to have your family. You're hugging and crying and never more grateful, and then the love overtakes you like another kind of storm sweeping your bodies up into the air—and now you're flying, holding hands and flying to another world without howling black storms that crush your home, without waves that swallow towns or fires that turn the earth to ash. A world where everything gone is here again and always will be.

            So hug your family and never mind the wind.

            Just fly away just fly away.

            They'll find us all again one day.

A.R. Bird (he/him) is a musician and educator who lives in Metro Detroit with his wife and two cats. He holds a master’s degree in English from Oakland University. His fiction has been shortlisted for the Letter Review Prize for Flash Fiction, and his songs have appeared on television shows such as The Fosters. His academic writing has been published in The Oakland Journal and cited in Prison Shakespeare and the Purpose of Performance: Repentance Rituals and the Early Modern.