Maple

The drive home was frantic. I knew he was okay, but I also knew the tornado had hit our house; his spare descriptions left too much to the imagination. The roads were wet and sometimes flooded; my car floated over these spots at eighty miles per hour, completely out of my control. I was banking on the hope that we could only be hit by one disaster a day. Luckily, I was right about that.

I only willingly slowed down when I pulled into the neighborhood and began to see the damage—trees down, power lines littering the road, and houses smashed by invisible fists, their guts yanked out and jumbled grotesquely across yards and ditches. I pulled into the driveway and saw the old, stately maple tree in the back yard had been pushed over by the tornado. Its corpse lay across the yard, its root system standing taller than a person. Its tender, vivid green leaves didn’t know they were dead yet.

He rushed out to greet me. As I fell into his embrace and bit back relieved tears, the maple tree inexorably drew my eyes over his shoulder.