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A Chest Full of Storm Clouds

by Elisabeth Ring

It’s Philip’s text that finally does it.

“Happy birthday!” it says. Just those two words. Not, “Happy birthday! I miss you!” Not, “Happy birthday! I’m sorry!” Not, “I was wrong. I love you. Please take me back.”

Happy. Birthday. Exclamation mark.

As if the long, emotionally fraught blocks of text above it, mostly from me, and un-responded to by him, don’t exist. As if he hadn’t broken my heart in a million pieces even before he left. As if we’re the kind of friends you remember to text on their birthday but not well enough to come up with anything more creative than just “Happy birthday!”

Reading that text, I feel something break loose deep inside. I maybe haven’t been handling the breakup well to begin with, plus work has been extra tough lately and I’m going to have to juggle credit cards to pay for everything this month. This text just unleashes everything I’ve been keeping locked up and I know I need to get to a storm chamber or I might actually explode.

Unfortunately, at the very moment I received Philip’s incredibly insensitive birthday text, I’d already gotten off the 517 bus in preparation to take the 607 to Papa Chang’s to gorge myself on as many Americanized Asian dishes as possible. And no, not to fill some void, as my armchair-therapist roommate said when I told her my plan. It’s just because it’s my birthday, and I can make myself sick on General Tso’s chicken and sweet-and-sour pork if I want to, Vanessa.

But being between two buses in a part of the city I’m not super familiar with is inconvenient, because this means I am too far away from any of the private storm chambers I have access to. I’m way too far away from home to go there. The one at work is less a proper storm chamber than it is a void to scream into—it’s not fully grounded, so there are signs that ask you to ‘not discharge any lightning, thx – management :)’ and the janitorial staff is always quick to complain whenever someone rains or snows too much inside—but it’s still better than nothing. Right now, I have nothing.

Except the StormFinder app, which I barely use because it just shows you the public storm chambers, and ew; people can be so irresponsible with their storms, and everyone’s heard about so-and-so’s cousin who slipped on some leftover ice or something. But in this moment, I would take a Port-A-Potty if it meant I didn’t have to melt down in public. According to the app, there are three storm chambers in a half-mile radius. I head for the closest one, two blocks away.

The map leads me to a little neighborhood of smaller stores and four-story apartment buildings, and even a couple of single homes on postage-stamp lots. The storm chamber, an eight-by-eight brick of concrete gray, is across the street from a shop advertising TAROT READINGS, INCENSE, & TAX PREPARATION. It sits between an apartment block and one of the postage-stamp homes. A yellow cat is sunning itself in the early-evening sun on the home’s porch. It would all look so peaceful if I didn’t have thunder rumbling in my ears. Above the chamber’s gold-plated door is the blessed green stripe that says it is vacant, it is unoccupied, it is ready to take this maelstrom churning in my chest. When I get close, the cat on the porch tenses up, then bolts.

Can’t say I blame it.

Inside, with the outer door securely sealed, my feet splash through the puddles left on the floor (this is what I mean about hating public storm chambers). I thrust my purse and phone in a waterproof cupboard dimpled by someone else’s hail a split second before the first bolt shoots from my fingers. I can’t get the cupboard to latch properly, so I lean against it as I open my mouth and scream.

Out rushes what feels like hurricane-force winds, pressing me harder against the cupboard as they force themselves out of me. My hands glow with lightning and the chamber vibrates with the rumble of my thunder. I shut my eyes against the brightness of my storm. Sheets of rain are pouring out around me, cold against my skin and plastering down my blouse, and that just makes me scream harder. I squeeze my hands into fists and beat them against the air, sending bolts of lightning flying every which way. The rain turns to hail. It stings as it hits my face and my arms, and hits the walls and floor with a rattle like an endless drumroll.

A whooshing sound that I can’t place hits my ears, so I crack my eyes open and look at the mess I’m making through my mascara-clumped lashes. The lightning has gotten swept up in the wind and the hail and the rain, and they’ve combined themselves into a fierce, churning monstrosity. I’ve never seen that before. The novelty, and the storm I’ve already released, is enough to make me stop and watch it, awestruck. It’s beautiful in a way, especially if I imagine Philip being sucked into its greedy center. I loosen my fists, relax my shoulders, and watch the storm until it peters out.

I’m almost dizzy from the exertion, but at least that means I don’t have energy to spare on being angry. There are black streaks across the chamber where the lightning struck and I’ve added some divots in the walls. Maybe it’s a good thing I did this in a public storm chamber, after all. I squeeze out my ponytail and then the hem of my blouse before opening up the cupboard and retrieving my purse and phone. Before opening the door, I palm under my eyes to wipe away the smudges of mascara. I’m eating alone, but that doesn’t mean I have to look like a complete wreck.

I squint at the bright sunset as the sun sinks below the tarot-incense-tax shop across the street. Someone else is waiting for the storm chamber: a man with hunched shoulders who altogether looks like he’s about to break. As I emerge, his pained expression flickers to shock. Either it’s the puff of ozone that accompanies me out of the chamber or I look worse than I think.

“Have at it,” I say, letting go of the door.

“Hey,” he calls after me. “Do you feel better?”

I pause and consider. “Yeah.”

All the pressure that’s been building up over the last few weeks has dissipated, and I’m not afraid of letting out a gust of wind every time I open my mouth or that electricity will come from my fingertips. Maybe that’s all I ever needed, just that release. Or maybe this is a temporary parting of the clouds. Maybe there’s still lightning gathering inside, coiling around my breastbone, waiting for life to demand it strike again.

But that’s another storm. For another day.

Now, in this post-storm clarity, I know Phillip might remember my birthday, but he’s not going to give me what I need. I block him so I won’t hope for the impossible after this conviction fades. Then, I turn and head for the 607’s stop. It’s my birthday. Fried rice and fortune cookies await.

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A Travel Guide to Thunderstorms

by E. M. Linden

Dear Olly,

Do you remember how strange Aunty Dymphna was? I’m not being cruel; I’m honestly asking you to remember. Please. Nobody else does, not even Mum, and I can’t worry Mum with this. Not while Dymphna’s missing.

I stayed with Dymphna when you were born. Did you know that? I made her a thank-you card: construction paper, glue-stick snail-trails and glitter. Mum must have packed the craft supplies. Not really Dymphna’s thing, but she sat beside me on the floor and helped. Glitter in the fibres of her jumper and her feathery hair. Years later, she showed me where I’d tracked a shimmering spill of it into her carpet. “Reminds me of a constellation,” she said. “But not one you’d recognise.”

She kept the card right up until she disappeared. I found it in her empty flat, tucked inside an envelope addressed to me, along with the Travel Guide to Thunderstorms. Remember the Guide? Slim and dog-eared. The only one of her books she never let us touch. We could pull anything we liked off the shelves; she’d bring us lemon tea and gingerbread while we read. Cookbooks, comics, encyclopaedias. “Research,” she called them. But the Guide she’d practically slap out of our hands.

I was disappointed when Mum named you Oliver. I was hoping she’d call you Cloudy, after Dymphna’s spaniel. He’s lying on my feet while I write. A comforting weight. As ageless as Aunty Dymphna.

Remember we joked Aunt Dymphna came from somewhere else? A stranded traveller who’d flown from another world. Just a game. Maybe we half-believed it.

Remember how her hugs always smelt of petrichor? How we could never count all the rooms nested in her little apartment? All those things we never considered odd at the time, and forgot as soon as we left. In our memories she was nobody remarkable. Just Aunty Dymphna, kind but eccentric, Mum’s oldest friend. She made pancakes. Wore boring clothes: grey-blue anoraks over cream wool jumpers. Her hair had always been grey.

We never remembered the truth about her. The contraption she had for harmonising spiderwebs. The way she made rain-puddles reflect other skies. On overcast days, we splashed and stamped through starred, black water. She sang fireflies out of the dark to land on our coats.

Please remember. I don’t want to be the only one who does.

She was intimately concerned with the skies. Followed the weather-forecast like a religion. She kept her eyes on the distance, as if watching for part of herself she’d once cast off, or for something following her. We joked she was searching for a way home, too.

We were wrong.

“I can feel a migration coming on,” she’d say, on nights so wild that sheets of water cascaded over the window-panes, and thunder rolled like rockslides down the roof. The kind of storm that crosses thresholds and opens doors. Wild geese yammering high above. Or something that sounded like them.

That’s when a strange light would surface in her eyes. She’d shut every window, stuff scarves into the gaps, although she never felt the cold. She never felt cold either; just tingly, like a low-level electric shock. She’d make tea (“It’s grounding,” she’d say), and let the storm pass overhead. And she’d grip the table, or my hand, so hard her knuckles whitened.

I wasn’t sure I liked that light in her eyes. There was something sharp about it. Sharp and cold. It had the luminosity of broken things: icicles, shattered glass. Lures in lightless depths.

In the morning her eyes would be normal again, just brown. “A migraine,” she’d say. I looked it up in the medical dictionary once. Sure enough, an ocular migraine causes flashes of light in the eyes. Sparkling stars.

Years later I realised that she should have been seeing the stars, not me.

I do know this: she wasn’t stranded. She was desperately trying to stay.

She loved us, Olly. She loved Mum, the lake, her books, gingerbread, songbirds, the supermarket. Even the grumpy old people in the local retirement village. She loved Cloudhound. She didn’t want to go.

---

I left her alone the night she disappeared. She asked me to play cards with her, but I wanted to meet a friend in town. A bit thoughtless of me, a bit selfish. Any other night it wouldn’t have mattered. But that was the night the storm came.

If you were there, you’d have stayed.

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I hope the Guide, the petrichor smell of its pages, will remind you of Dymphna as she really was. I hope, because I’ll be gone by the time you read this. I’ve been practicing with the Guide. I’ve called the storm. I’m going after her.

Dymphna was right to watch the skies. They searched for her, those things that sound like wild geese. She was one of them once. They never stopped hunting her. She never said their names, in case they heard; only called them the grey people.

They’re like her. But they are not kind.

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I need your help. The Guide will show you what to do. As you read images will appear, one after the other like strung diamonds. Raindrops on autumn leaves. Constellations. It won’t make sense at first. And then it will.

Watch for the lightning.

Keep reading. The images will come faster and faster. An unfamiliar tarot of lights. A sickle moon, scything the dark. Fairy-dust and frost.

Nothing like Dymphna, unshowy and warm. Nothing like her kindness, her books, her rain-grey, sheltering wings.

Read until you reach the tipping-point. Hold your balance; don’t fall into the skies. Call the storm, but keep your feet grounded on the earth. We’ll need someone to remember us, when I find her, when we resurface. A path for us to follow. A kite-string for our travelling spark.

Guide us home.

That’s all.

Tell Mum I love her. The storm’s here now. The air’s changing. I can almost hear the wild geese.