I landed at the airport and my dad picked me up in the minivan I’d been trying to get him to trade in. He gave me a hug and said we’re stopping to give blood before going home. He’d already been twice that week, and he wasn’t looking good for it, not at his age. We stopped on the way to buy some fruit and beer. When we pulled in, my dad immediately started conversation with some people he recognized. I stood and smiled and nodded politely while eating an apple and smoking a cigarette before we went inside.
The blood drive was held at a high school gymnasium. People my age that I recognized from childhood were handing out forms at the check-in tables with their kids tugging at their pant legs for permission to play in the collapsed stadium bleachers. A local dentist took my blood and watched as I smiled at the girl handing out candy bars. She blushed and smiled back with crooked teeth, so I gave her a wink and went to find my dad.
When I got in the car, I felt lightheaded, but reached out for the plastic cup of cold beer Dad handed me as we pulled away. A humming sound began in my ears.
After a long night catching up, I woke up with the same humming and a bit of a headache. Skipping breakfast but not the coffee, Dad and I started work on the house early. By ten a.m., we were sweating and drinking beer again, stopping occasionally to watch as the sky got darker with big fuck-off clouds. He pried up a piece of siding that’d been torn loose and a bunch of bees swarmed him. At first I couldn’t recognize what I was seeing because their humming and the humming in my ears were the same, the eight-bit buzz and general drunkenness slowed my reaction as I watched him flail and run to the garden hose.
We spent the afternoon slathering his hand with oatmeal, and then taping the windows, as the weatherman had said that another storm was coming through and that emergency personnel were on high alert. We set up a camp in the basement with sleeping bags and ancient MREs. The electricity was out, so Dad pulled out an old battery-powered radio, and we listened to the classical station in between reports of towns the storm had decimated.
When it hit that night, I climbed the back cellar stairs and went out into the yard to watch as shingles peeled off of our neighbors’ homes. Just above each crack of lightening, and the humming in my ears, I could hear the tornado sirens wailing again and again in their call for us to flee. I turned and saw my father at the foot of the stairs, beckoning me to come back inside.
Matthew Kopel has his B.A. in Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.