CROSSWIND

Jacob stood his ground, feet planted, windbreaker whipping against his body. His microphone was useless in the wind, but he kept reporting. The other trucks, the desk-jockey weathermen, had all left—retreated to studios and green screens. The story is out here in the sky. This is why they watch. Live, now. And later they’ll share it to their timelines, text it to their friends. See the storm?

Footage of the twister that had killed Paula still creeps up in search results. The people who watch it “ooh” at the debris cloud—oblivious that one of those zooming specks liked pineapple on her pizza and sang along to opera in languages she didn’t know. Maybe she knows them now.

Even magnified on the wall-sized screen in the studio, he couldn’t tell which speck was her. Couldn’t see where she learned to fly—tasted the storm in ways he never had. Maybe never would. The closest he could get to her now was here on the beach, telling everyone to take shelter. Take cover, the last thing he’d said to Paula, but too late.

“Took an unexpected turn,” is what he said—what the storm did. What so many storms do—unpredictable, always reminding him I was wrong I was wrong I was wrong.

They still called him Radar. He was right more often than not. He saved lives, the anchorwomen reminded him. And sometimes they die anyway.

Blowing sand sounded like angry snakes against his cinched hood. The earpiece broadcasted static. He recited the same wind stats again, rambled about currents. They couldn’t hear, back at the desk, but no one cared—they just want to see him stagger, watch something heavy blow away in the background. Good TV.

When he felt the wind shift, saw it was on the move, he wrapped up.

Ten years ago, I’d have thrown the camera in the van and hit the road—gotten ahead of the thing and seen if that spin of warm air had more fight in it up the coast. He’d watch his laptop radar for that trailing hook—like a bullseye—storm chase treasure.

But this camera wasn’t his. Neither was the van.

If you blew up the old footage, you could tell which speck was his van. Watch it arc off the ground, up and around, bright in the light angling in from beyond the angry system.

An unexpected shift in the wind.

The studio van rocked over wind-whipped sand dunes back toward the road. His hearing hadn’t recovered from the roar of the storm. He turned up the radio—his competitor’s station.

“Maybe if Radar spent more time at his station and less time playing at the beach, he’d have seen this one coming,” their weatherman said. The blonde anchor laughed—he could tell it was the blonde one, recognized the laugh.

Jacob punched the button, silenced the station. His team wasn’t broadcasting now. Wouldn’t be for another two hours. They shared the airwave with the local church and school district. If he tuned in now, all he’d get is a sermon. Maybe a song—if he was lucky, Becky Merriweather at the mic. She always joked that if they married, he’d have to take her name. She was nearly old enough to be his mother. Didn’t know he’d been married before. Thought a nice young man like him ought to be.

Back home, he flicked the TV on, saw his own face—or what he could of it, cinched inside his hood, behind a pair of ski goggles that kept the rain and sand out of his eyes. His lips moved, words unintelligible, but it looked impressive. Torn awnings whipped around the boardwalk behind him, birds flapping like mad, unmoving in the sky. But no vans. No wives.

People would be watching, more interested in the storm than the goons on four making fun of him.

He left the TV on through the night.

***

At the station in the morning, faces were grim. He returned his camera to Phil—he wouldn’t need it today. No one tunes in for blue skies. Phil poured sand from the case, popped the disc, handed it to him wordlessly, and side-eyed him as he packed the gear away.

Jacob returned the look in kind as he stepped through the glass door into the open, shared office.

The grating voice—the wide, ugly face of the anchor from four took up the whole screen wall.

“ . . . could have been a local disaster not unlike the storm from years ago that took a life here in Miranda County . . . ”

“The fuck is this?” Jacob said, waving at the screen. The sound cut, the anchor’s lips still flapping.

“Sorry, Jake. They’re making a thing of it—the storm you called wrong.”

“It was just a thunderstorm. No one was hurt. Right?” His heart fluttered.

“One lady can’t find her dog.” Susan looked down as she said it—her face the waxy clay color left over from the morning show.

Jacob patted his hair. It always stood up, forever in the wind. His head always in the storm.

Dan came forward, the remote in one hand, ratings in the other. “They said your miscalculation was dangerous. That you’re still just a storm chaser. That you belong on the side of the road and not in a newsroom.”

“Those fucking jerks.”

“Yeah. People ate it up. Stupid always sells.”

Jacob grabbed the remote and hurled it at the screen. The duct tape from the last time held it together.

“I’ve been storm chasing for twenty-three years! The fact that I’m even still alive means I’m good at it. I can read a radar—I can read a fucking storm.”

“We know that, Jake.”

Paula’s ghost hung in the room, pushing everyone’s chins to the floor.

“Why don’t you take the day? Get some rest. Weather’s clear here now.” Dan forced a smile.

“How do you know?”

Susan’s eyes shot to the screen. Of course. The news.

Jacob stalked out of the room. A day would be good. Maybe that storm was still within driving distance—rough and gorgeous.

He checked the camera back out.

***

It had moved northeast, those warm winds from the south hitting the cold Canadian front and stirring up a cataclysm. The sort of storm that leaves little ambiguity for meteorologists. No one needs a weatherman to tell them to take shelter when the trees begin to bend.

Jacob went north along the beach, just a few miles out ahead of it. He dug the tripod legs deep into the sand, pointed the camera at the sea, across a marina where the boats bucked like angry bulls.

The world needs a new waterspout video. Something viral. Bury the old clip, like I could never bury her.

Conditions were perfect. If they held, it would work this time.

Wisps of funnels dangled from the underside of the cloud, forming, then spinning out. The twisting ropes stretched closer and closer to the foaming swells offshore. Lightning stabbed, whiting out the world, snapping it back to a different view.

One of the funnels dropped, gaining strength, rotating so fast its body seemed as smooth as glazed porcelain.

Jacob let the video roll and lifted his still camera, taking shots. Paula used to do this part. He felt the vibration of the shutter—the wind howling too loud now to hear anything but the relentless engine of nature.

The hair on his body rose. The world went white and split with a roar, then concussed into silence. His body burned with its own friction, everything the flavor of ions.

When his vision returned, blighted with dark erasures, the funnel churned in front of him—its smooth surface now scarred with sand, sea rock, the silver flash of unlucky fish. The wind pulled the breath from his lungs like a greedy kiss. He tried to scream, but the sky left him nothing. All air belonged to the storm.

Behind a veil of debris and vapor, he saw a face—lean and cold, with eyes the color of heavy clouds. He stared into those deep shadows, trying to read their currents. His mouth hung open, filling with sand and salt spray.

“Paula?” Sand grated across his tongue as he spoke.

He squinted against the whipping sand and shells, and reached into the funnel, toward the glowering face. Rocks beat his wrist and forearm. The heat of his blood ran cold in the biting wind. His fingers closed on something rough and solid. He clenched his grip around the thing and pulled, drawing it out of the eye and back through the whipping wall of storm. He leaned against the draw of the vortex. His hand reappeared through the sheet of vapor and he fell back onto the sand.

The funnel roped, twisted erratically, losing stability until it broke, wisped, and disappeared back up into the churning clouds.

Jacob lay panting in the sand. He reached to wipe debris from his eyes and found the strange thing still clutched in his fist. A handle of driftwood—light and smooth. From it protruded a carved scrimshaw blade.

He sucked air into his lungs, and the gasp echoed beside him.

A woman lay shivering, naked in the sand. A mane of hair fanned around her in tangled silver dreadlocks. Her skin was grey as a fish’s belly, and her roving eyes were white-gold as lightning.

She coughed as if the air abraded her lungs.

Jacob scrambled to sit and peeled off his windbreaker. He fished his phone from the pocket and draped the jacket over her.

“You’re okay—it’s okay; I’m calling for help.”

The phone felt hot and wet against his cheek. He pulled it back, long strings of dark plastic trailing between his face and his hand. The glass of the screen fell away as fine sand.

The woman shrieked, then coughed like thunder. She reached out from under his jacket and grabbed for the knife that had fallen next to his leg.

“Oh—no, no, it’s okay. I want to help. Are you hurt?” He tucked the knife into his camera bag. Paula’s camera bag.

She thrashed and threw his coat aside, reaching for him.

“Stop!” He grabbed her arms. “Where are you from? Did you get lost in the storm?”

How had she survived and not Paula? Why not Paula?

She leveled her eyes at him. He felt the hair on his arms rise in her yellow glare. She began to shake.

“You’re in shock. I’ll drive you to the hospital. They can contact your family.”

He scanned the roads along the beachfront—no cops, no cars at all. “I’m sorry, but you need a doctor.” She was light, but fought him, biting his hands and arms. He set her on a seat and slid the door shut. He grabbed his bag and the tripod. The video camera belched a black line of smoke.

A pattern crossed the sand. The wide, twisting line where the funnel had come ashore had melted—the sand fused into a glossy crystalline sheet. He pressed a foot onto it, shattering the glass like pond ice.

He turned to the van to see the back window spidering, cracking like the sand. The woman’s bright eyes refracted through fissures, her pale hands pressing against the glass.

Jacob slid into the driver’s seat and started the engine.

“Just calm down, please—I’m going to take you to the hospital.”

She opened her mouth, gasped, and her sternum collapsed against a cage of bones. She screamed a clap of thunder that shattered all the windows. The car alarm yelped, and the airbag knocked Jacob back against the seat.

A funnel of cold mist shot from her mouth and blasted the side of Jacob’s face. Icy water ran down his shirt and pooled in his seat.

Jacob wiped the water from his eyes and stared at the woman. Her mouth closed and her sternum reflated. Eyes cooled to a muddy grey.

Droplets of rain shook from Jacob’s hair. “Who are you?”

She watched his mouth. Licked her lips with a scaled tongue.

“I’m a tempest,” she said, in a voice like swelling wind.

Jacob stared at her, at how clouds seemed to pass through her eyes. “You’re a storm. That storm?” He gestured to the sky, now void-blue, the raging system gone. Now in his back seat.

“Give me my blade,” she hissed.

“Are there others like you?”

“We are one storm. We are many. Give me my blade so I may return. I was not finished. I have a gale yet in my throat.”

Jacob ran his eyes over the creature’s anatomy. “But you’re a woman. Where does the wind come from? Where does it go?”

“It came from my sister to the south. It goes north and east.”

Jacob’s eyes widened. “You know the wind. All of it. All the time?”

The charge of yellow was rebuilding in her eyes. “I am the wind.”

Jacob turned and wrenched the van into gear. “I know where to go. Someplace safe.”

He backed over dunes toward the seaside road. The gutters flowed with runoff rain. He splashed onto the street and headed for the highway.

“Do you have a name?”

She concussed the car with a roll of thunder.

Jacob swerved, hydroplaned, regained control. He glanced in the mirror. She sat slouched in the seat, eyes slits, irises the color of fog.

***

He pulled the van into the garage and lowered the door before he dragged the storm woman, half-conscious but still struggling, from the backseat. She’d shaken the van three more times with her thunder on the way to his house, each time growing weaker.

Jacob hadn’t opened the door to Paula’s studio since The Storm. She’d always kept it locked. The key hung on a nail by the door. There had been a second key on her keyring. They never found that, either.

Jacob hurried down the basement stairs, clutching the tempest. Her body reverberated like distant thunder—the feel of it against his chest made his heart race, then slow, then race again. He held her awkwardly against himself, fingers slipping over skin the texture of fine-grit rubber, as he fumbled for the key and opened the door.

The smell of Paula nearly dropped him. Her robe lay draped over the back of the chair. Her slippers under the desk. Four tubes of her lip balm at the base of the desk lamp—always handy to soothe her storm-chapped lips. The scent of film and the fluids used to develop it. All of it hit him at once—as if she’d been in this room all along, working the months away while the world went on without her.

But she wasn’t here.

A storm took her.

The storm bit Jacob’s arm, and his flesh froze at the touch of her mouth. He screamed and pushed her into the small room. Her eyes turned amber again—the cloudy grey clearing.

Jacob pulled the robe from the chair and tossed it to her. “What do you eat?” he asked.

She smiled, revealing the inky interior of her mouth. “Everything,” she said. Her eyes sparked yellow. Her chest concaved over her ribs.

Jacob slammed the door as thunder exploded. The wood jumped against his shoulder.

When he caught his breath again, when the ringing in his ears had faded, he cracked the door. Everything glass in the room had shattered. All of Paula’s lenses and plates turned to razor sand.

The storm lay on the floor, gasping, eyes dark. Her face twisted as he looked over her.

“Take me outside,” she growled. “Give me back my blade. I need the sky.”

Jacob closed the door and turned the lock.

He unloaded his bags. The video camera had practically melted, but the chip appeared intact. He popped it into the reader.

The funnel twisted across the screen—pale and beautiful, impossibly smooth. It roped and bent closer to shore, tossing debris. He saw himself walking toward it, reaching for it, then all went white.

He pulled the strange knife from his bag. The driftwood handle curved into his palm, its surface smooth but fibrous, polished as if by a hundred years of holding. The scrimshaw blade arced away from the wood, fiercely serrated, carved with strange symbols. Some resembled waves, funnels, and branching lightning; others were impossible to discern.

He slid open a drawer, lay the knife on a messy stack of files, and locked it.

He watched the video again, and again. It never showed the face deep inside the wind. It stopped before he’d pulled the knife from her center, pulled down the storm. None of the debris looked like Paula.

He clicked over to a live feed of the news.

No one reported the storm. It was as if no one but him had even seen it.

Beneath his feet, the storm raged.

***

Thunder shook the house every few hours through the night. By dawn, the pulses became less frequent, less urgent. Jacob sat in bed watching layers of feathered ice spread across the insides of his windows.

He revived his old phone and scrolled through the overnight weather maps and radars. His frown deepened with every refresh of the page. The currents were all wrong. The hot gulf winds arced west, dropping rain storms across Arizona. Arctic fronts sank like rocks across the east and well into Florida. Windsocks across the Midwest hung limp.

Climate scientists around the globe sweated against green screens, stumbling over words like “unprecedented,” “anomaly,” “unpredictable.”

Jacob’s heart hammered. Unpredictable. They can’t predict any of this.

He grabbed his notebook and ran down the basement stairs just as his phone chirped a series of texts from Dan asking him to hurry—they needed him live ASAP.

He unlocked the studio door and peered inside.

His heart cartwheeled for a moment at the sight of the empty room, till he saw the storm plastered to the ceiling, glowering down at him. Her eyes were nearly full gold. He swallowed the lump in his throat and spoke quickly.

“I’ll give your knife back—not yet, but soon. Just, first, tell me everything. What’s happening with the wind? Where are the storms? Where will they be?”

***

The vapid anchors of channel four weren’t laughing anymore. They were tuned in—watching Radar. Everyone was. Not just locally, but nationally. He put off questions about his sources, muttering half-formed information about studies he and Paula had conducted on the road.

“There’s no better way to understand a storm than to chase it. Corner it and see what it does.”

He saved lives. Hundreds. He sent people to basements before the clouds even began to spin—and they listened.

Jacob called the shots till his voice gave. Near midnight, he reached the end of his notes. The end of the storm predictions.

He slid his notebook in his pocket. Said he needed a break. Sleep, food—time with maps, then he would be back, he promised.

The media team’s devices lit up with angry calls and tweets. They—the public—wanted him to stay. They needed him. Relied on him—their lives depended on his forecast.

He needed the storm.

“I’ll be back soon,” he said.

He sped home, listening to the broadcasts and weather reporters who tried to pick up where he left off, but who mostly talked about how he couldn’t know what he knew, instead of addressing the needs of their communities.

He ran inside, slipped and fell down the hard wood planks of the basement stairs—ice a half-inch thick coated them. A cut above his ear bled into the frost on the floor, congealing into a red slurry. He pressed at the wound, the inevitable headache already blooming.

Thunder boomed and shattered the ice sheet, sending him back to the floor, where icicle daggers pelted him from the ceiling. He covered his head till the world stilled again. The barometric pressure dropped, his ears popping as a wave of vertigo hit.

Jacob pulled himself up; small cuts across his body stung as he waded through the ice shards to the studio door.

The storm was inside the eye of a debris field. Everything was broken, every speck of it a little bit of Paula. Her scent was gone, replaced with the cool ions of lightning and snow.

Jacob’s temper rose like an updraft. He stomped through the room, pieces of his past, of his Paula, crunching underfoot. Here, all the debris was her. Every speck.

He lifted the storm by her hair.

“What have you done to this room?” He tossed her back down into a pile of broken glass.

She laughed and it blew the hair back off his forehead. “I do what I do. There’s nothing else that I can be but a tempest. Trapped in your teapot.” She laughed again and the blood in his lacerations froze.

His phone beeped and rattled against the keys in his pocket. More storms, unseasonable and unnatural, twisted across the country.

“Call off the storms.”

She smiled her ink-in-water smile. “I can’t call them. I can only meet their winds with my own. We push and pull each other through the sky.”

“Push them, then!”

“I can’t take my place in the pattern from here.” Her breath grew faint, her eyes more milky than stormy, not yet taking on the slightest cast of yellow.

“Then tell me what happens next. Those storms are deadly. I need to know where they’re going.”

“All storms are deadly.” The storm’s eyes roved in her head, shot through with white-hot lines. Her arms shook, scattering drops of rain around the room. She collapsed.

Jacob grabbed her and shook. “Where are the storms going?”

“To sea. All storms go to sea.”

He dropped her on the floor, his phone already to his ear as he locked the door and raced up the stairs, kicking aside chunks of melting ice.

***

He burst into the newsroom they’d prepped for him. The cloud map imposed across the wall screen, circulating in digital blips over the world map. He jumped in front of it.

“The system will continue to head southwest across southern California, moving out to sea. Expect continued rainfall as it progresses—there could be some flash flooding in the hills and burn scars. Don’t try to drive through deep or moving water, plan an evacuation route to high ground—”

As he spoke, the swinging arm of the stormfront moved eastward, churning north—directly away from where he had just indicated.

The anchors in his peripheral vision exchanged confused looks.

He froze, watching the system as it pulsed closer.

“We’ll be right back,” he said, nodding to Dan. Dan cut the feed.

“Can I get a computer?” he shouted into the shadows offstage. Phil came running with a laptop.

Jacob called up all the satellites and radars, the wind maps and thermals. The storm was moving east. Quickly. Not to sea, but straight back into the Midwest.

“That’s not where it was going . . . ” he said. Susan and Dan looked at him, shook their heads. Not even Cathy’s makeup magic could hide the circles under their eyes or the way their furrowed brows cracked the flesh-toned paste.

He opened his storage drive and grabbed the video clip from the previous morning.

“Show them that. Distract them. Stall. I need to . . . I need to go talk to the storm.” He left before their incredulous faces could fully form.

***

The ice in the house had all melted. He splashed down the basement steps and unlocked the door. The storm was crumpled on the floor where he’d left her, her wild hair strung in clumps through the broken glass. She wasn’t moving.

Jacob knelt next to her, his pants soaking up the icy water.

The thunder in her chest sounded far away. A storm receding.

He pulled her hair off her face and gripped her shoulders. He squeezed and her scaly eyelids fluttered.

“You were wrong about the storm,” he said, unsure she could even hear him.

She struggled against his grip and tried to sit. “I can’t see . . . ”

“Your eyes are closed.”

“I can’t see the sky.”

“You need to see the sky? You need to go outside to predict the storm?”

“I need the wind.”

She was too weak to fight or run or stop his heart with thunder bursts. Her eyes were as milky as cataracts—not a trace of lightning yellow.

“I’ll take you outside, just tell me what’s happening.”

She was easy to lift. She hung in his arms like seaweed.

The sun crept lower toward the tree line. Wind pulled and pushed at him. He staggered to the grass and lay the storm down on his overgrown lawn. She quivered as the wind raked over her cold skin.

“Bring my blade,” she said.

“I can’t. Not yet. I need you to tell me—”

“Bring my blade! Set me free. I’ll grant your knowledge.” Her voice gained strength already.

“First tell me where the storms are going.”

Her eyelids fluttered and peeled back from swirling charcoal irises. “They aren’t going. They’re coming.”

He stared at the sky. A dark line stretched across the horizon.

“Free me. Let me go and I will have the wind whisper secrets to you.”

He looked back. She’d pulled herself up into a crouch, her fingers twisting in the grass.

“You can do that?”

“If I want to.”

“Why would I need that if I have you?” A gust nearly swept him from his feet. He looked up again at the darkening sky. “The storm is coming here?”

She smiled weakly. “All of the storms are coming here.”

“You said you couldn’t tell them what to do!”

“I can’t. But they’re coming anyway. Storms are unpredictable.” Her legs trembled as she pushed herself to stand.

His face heated. The wind felt even colder.

“Are you the one? The storm that took Paula?” His nails cut into his palms.

Her smile grew. “I’ve had a thousand Paulas.”

“You’ll never get that blade back. You’ll never kill again. I’ll shake the knowledge out of you till you blow out, till you’re nothing but mist—a sneeze,” he shouted over the roaring wind.

She laughed, and her ropes of hair twisted in the sky. “It will be easy enough to pluck it from the rubble. I’ll have it either way.” She held out her open hand.

Lightning streaked across the sky in a jagged branch. It exploded against a tree on a nearby hillside. Thunder knocked him to his knees.

Jacob squinted at the silhouette of a funnel against the black sky.

“The time for choices is over . . . ”

He ran back into the house, grabbed the knife, and headed for the basement, sheltering in the ruin of Paula’s things.

Out of the roaring wind, he heard his phone, crowing like a gull—every notification pinging at once. He thumbed open an app and started a live feed.

“Get to shelter! A basement or interior room! A severe storm—multiple systems converging, tornadic—”

His electricity cut with a pop.

“Storm’s here—shelter now!”

They couldn’t see him, but they could hear him. He kept broadcasting, watching angry comments scroll against the dark rectangle where his face was hidden.

—you said west

—don’t have a basement . . .

—are we gonna die

—you were wrong

You were wrong you were wrong you were wrong . . .

His voice stuck behind the lump in his throat.

The wind came up like a jet engine. He shrunk down as beams shrieked and split overhead.

“Storms are unpredictable,” he croaked into the mic just as the ceiling lifted away and the basement filled with the strobe of lightning. His live viewer count ticked down one by one, then all at once, before the house came back down on him.

***

Wind licked his face.

Faint light filtered pink through his eyelids. He peeled his eyes open. Thin ropes of white twisted around him like the bars of a cage. Behind each swirling veil was a face.

He struggled to sit. Wind pinned him on his back.

“This one would have all knowledge of storms,” a familiar voice cooed.

“Ahh,” they all sighed, their voices circling him, the long sigh blowing his wet hair.

“To save his people?” Another voice circled him, cycling around behind and back again.

“No.”

“Guilt.”

“Ego.”

“Power.”

He tried to track a single face, but his eyes rolled.

“Shall we?”

“Tell him?”

“Show him?”

“Make him?”

“Pin him to the sky on the end of a blade.”

“Turn his tempest inside out.”

“Make him into what he is.”

Faces leaned in through the vapor veils—all dusky and heavy with rain, eyes hot and static, charged with bright energy.

“But what is his blade? Which is his first kill?”

“So many died in the night, but which was first?”

The storm—his storm—paused her cycle to stare into his eyes. “His first kill was called Paula. Here is his blade.”

The long, silver studio key rose above him.

“Paula?” he croaked, his voice lost—pulled from his mouth into the vortex.

The key dagger fell into him. Impaled him, driven by a hammer of wind. He felt it twist, moving hot through him like a spear of lightning. His head spun. His gut swirled. He twisted in pain and rage, writhing, till he lifted against the wind and joined it—turning, roping, raging.

A storm. Full of thunder. Destruction.

The funnels peeled off, away in every direction, tracing scars across the earth. The storms were everywhere. Unpredictable.

Jacob twisted and twisted, a tight knot of air, digging a hole in the ground.