Blurring the Boundaries: Explorations to the Fringes of Nonfiction

Steven Church

60 Steven Church Thirty Minutes to the End An Essay to My Aunt Judy on the Occasion of the May 4, 2007, Tornado Greensburg, Kansas | May 4, 2007 9:15 p.m. | Thirty Minutes Aunt Judy, your first question might have been: What did the man on the radio say? Did he say tornado “emergency”? You’re not even sure what that means. Perhaps the radios vibrated with the dial-tone hum of warning. The tv too, its signal coming in at a slightly higher pitch, noise warbling between devices, coupled with the splash of Doppler green, orange, and red covering your town, maybe the whole corner of the state. This noise, this awful whine becomes an abomination, no help at all. So you simply switch it off. Earlier, just before dusk, you may have sat on your sunporch, newly wallpapered, and watched the grove of trees bend and twist in the wind. As a beginning image, I like to put you there, the last afternoon light brushing your cheek. One last moment of quiet in this house of stories. Outside now the noise continues. New noise. Yellow warning sirens crank up and wail around their poles. Through the small kitchen window above your sink, the sky turns green and then bruise-colored purple. Clouds stampede, rolling and tumbling, reaching tendrils thirty minutes to the end 61 down, but you can barely see them in these penumbral hours of the day just before the dark of night truly falls. Now perhaps you smell the air tinged with ozone. The crackle of static. And the man on the radio tells you it is coming; not the train that blew past on the tracks; not the morning; not salvation; not the friends from church who come over sometimes in the evenings. Not yet. Not tonight. Now it is something much worse—but you cannot know these things yet, have not seen the pictures I’ve seen splashed in the days after. You cannot picture the sticks, the rubble, the piles of bricks, the abstract painting of scree as seen from a satellite. 9:20 p.m. | Twenty-five Minutes You have begun to think about whether you should take this seriously. The man on the radio says ten minutes. You have ten minutes to take cover. But you’ve heard these warnings before. Ten minutes to the apocalypse . Twenty days to the end of the world. But just a minute ago, you stood out in the front yard, staring up at the sky with your neighbors, just like you always do when the sky really starts to churn, when a big storm is brewing. You could feel the wind on your face, tugging at your cheeks, loosening the curls in your hair, pressing the fabric of your skirt flat against your thighs. Now you are standing in the front hall of your house, the weight of your body settled into your feet. Shoes off, toes wiggling on the rug. Your big empty house haunted with ghosts of all of us. The silent piano. My brother and me peer out from walls. All the cousins. The siblings. The babies. Family Christmases. My grandparents , your parents. The holiday “shows” in this house. Your husband, Bill, sitting on a saddle mounted on a piano bench singing “I’ve Been So Lonely in My Saddle Since My Horse Died” and playing a tiny toy guitar. 62 steven church He’s gone now. Your children have moved away. Everyone gone from this place, this house, this town, this state. But the memories still dance around these rooms like mortar dust blown from the joints and seams. Motes of us, captured in the waning light, drift through stray yellow beams, still lingering in the house. Here is another image: children’s voices call out from the room upstairs, the one with the electric trains, their noise rising over the tinny chug-chug and whistle of the locomotives as the walls crumble to dust around them. But that couldn’t be happening yet, could it? Not now. Not yet. You still have ten minutes. There are no children left in this house. That much is true. 9:25 p.m. | Twenty Minutes Now you have retreated to the basement, locked the door at the top of the stairs. Now you have the television on, the news reports talking to you. Telling you things. f5 they say. A...