THE TWISTER WAS roaring down the long-abandoned Union Pacific railroad tracks, its sights set on the 1,344 friendly people who called Stafford, Kansas, their home.
I remembered visiting Stafford, a nearby town, once when I was a toddler.
My mother and father took me to a restaurant called the Curtis Café, famous for its handwritten menu, homemade pies, and completed jigsaw puzzles lining all the wood-paneled walls.
If I didn’t stop this tornado, every one of those puzzles would be torn back into its thousands of pieces again. So would every building on Main Street.
Furious, I glanced over at Mikaela, who had clearly called up the life-threatening twister. She had a way-too-angelic expression on her face for someone who wasn’t exactly acting on the side of good so far.
In fact, she looked like she was studying me. Waiting for my reaction to the crisis. I guess I was her little white lab rat. Would I fight the tornado or would I flee the scene?
The basement of my old house doubled as a storm cellar, so that would’ve been the logical choice.
Hide down there. Ride out the storm.
But they had really, really good raisin cream pie at the Curtis Café down in Stafford.
“I’ll be back,” I promised my strange visitor, who was still bathed in her warm glow even though the sky above us looked like soggy balls of sooty cotton.
Fueled by the surging need to protect others, my powers felt like they had been ratcheted up to a mathematically impossible one-hundred-and-ten percent. Making like a champion figure skater, I went up on one toe, held up both arms, and applied force to generate torque on my axis of rotation. When my angular momentum had me spinning, I brought down my arms to reduce my moment of inertia and increase my angular velocity.
Twirling dizzily, faster than Natalia Kanounnikova when she set the Guinness ice spinning record of 308 revolutions per minute, I rearranged my molecular structure so I became a whirling dervish of a dust cloud. After centrifugal force had expanded me outward to the size of an Arabian dust storm, I tore across the flat plains and became the first tornado ever to chase a tornado.
Seconds later, I smacked my whirlwind self into the cyclone Mikaela had whipped up and became one with the twister heading for Stafford. Through the power of my imagination, our gale-force winds merged and we became a single gigantic funnel cloud full of dust, death, and destruction. The instant the first tornado’s molecular structure became grafted onto mine, I took over as cyclone pilot and set a new course: straight up into the sky.
In a flash, we weren’t in Kansas anymore.
We were about thirty thousand feet above it, and above all those angry clouds.