Tornado Warning Vibes

“Homage to George Romero: Flamingo Apocalypse” by Lindsey Morrison Grant

Marcus removes his storm suit in the hallway while I beckon desperately for him to come inside. We’ve had this argument before: I worry the wind will suck him out through the window. He insists the possibility that he might unwittingly drip street sludge and its toxins inside my home poses a greater danger to me than the wind does to him.

“I wouldn’t fit,” he told me the last time we’d had it out, mimicking his own hypothetical panic with his backside wedged in the window, palms pressing the walls adjacent to the window, the wind ultimately failing to claim him. The laughter ruptured my resolve, and that was the end of that. Still, as he stands there unlayering now, I can’t help but imagine the glass window panes sucking away, turning sideways and funneling suddenly skyward, his body following shortly behind, like Dorothy and all her belongings.

He pulls the suit apart like an astronaut: hood from neck, gloves from arms, booties from the ankles. The shell is almost completely impermeable, made from the same material as the dry bags I used to take out rafting when the Colorado was still a river. After the shell, there is the tissue, an ultra-thin, translucent piece of fabric covering his whole body, even his face, that filters out the toxins inevitably lurking in the murky street streams, on the off-chance that any of it somehow penetrates the shell.

He pulls a mini-sterilizer from the pocket of his basketball shorts, shines it over the clothes until it blinks thrice, scoops it all up and comes inside. Together, we shut and reinforce the door, then move to double check my apartment’s windows. We work wordlessly, my ears ringing as they readjust from the roaring hallway to the comparative quiet of a locked-down space, the wind’s terrible shrieking muted but imposing still.

Through one semi-transparent window pane, I see the panel of a boarded shop tear loose and spin into the window of a car parked directly below us. The alarm blares, I’m sure, but its panicked noise is blunted to my ears, as if I live underwater instead of spending most of my life fighting to remain above it.

When Marcus first bought the storm suit a decade ago, I teased him for it. It was early 2022 then—toxic floods were still relegated to future terrors and tornado warnings were still exceedingly rare in New York.

“It’s the definition of Disaster Capitalism,” I said over FaceTime. “Classic Supreme. Fuck them. I guarantee you it does nothing at all.”

“At least I’ll be fashionable in the apocalypse.”

“Yeah, but what will happen when everyone that doesn’t get your ‘storm suit’”—I placed the phone between my knees in order to get my air quotes into the camera frame—“dies and then you’ll have nobody to show your suit off to? How will it be fashionable?” I snapped and pointed triumphantly. “It won’t.”

He shook his head, laughing, “Ok, you’re right. I guess at that point I’ll have to kill myself.”

By the middle of the decade, though, the floods came. Slowly at first and then wrathfully, menacingly, leaving most people dead or starving. The water we’d seen coming, but the toxins were something else. Eventually, their frequency plateaued and became somewhat predictable. Something about “saturation stabilizing the feedback loop” and “flattening its previously exponential curve,” I guess.

It was people with suits who organized the Community Centers, which are pretty much the only reason anyone outside the bunkers has been able to survive. Another, harsher normal replaced the old one. But before that normal set in, before the acute chaos that preceded it, Marcus and I had already broken up. Years had passed by the time I saw him again and had the chance to admit that I had been wrong, after all, about the suit.

Once the apartment feels secure, I pour us each a glass of wine.

“How are the streets?” I ask him. I have not left the apartment since the day of our chance reunion, about one month ago now.

“The water isn’t even that high,” he leans over to show me, leveling his palm flat just above his ankle, “But it’s blowing really fucking hard. I probably shouldn’t have come. It tossed me up at one point.”

“You’re kidding me. Can you please reign it in with the recklessness? People depend on you.”

He shrugs. “Sometimes, it’s just like, if it’s going to happen, I’d rather it just catch me unaware. It’d be like Before.”

I gulp my wine. It tastes like vinegar. “What’s ‘it’? Death? I don’t follow.”

“It’s just the idea of ‘dying doing something banal.’ Like, Before it would have been tragic for me to die driving the Major Deacon over to see you. Now the activity that’s both life-risking and normal at the same time is suiting up and walking three blocks to see you. It’s your normal, safe life with your banal activities and then you slip up and do something stupid, like text and drive, except now it’s misjudge the wind, and you’re dead. I feel nostalgic for that, I guess. For ‘banality’ to even be possible. ‘Cause now we’re just always scared.”

He has a way of talking with his hands and watching his own gesticulations when he is deep in thought, as though watching his own body will give him more information than whatever is coming from his head to make him speak. It is not until he pauses that he finally looks up at me and notices me beaming to myself.

“Why are you smiling like that?” he asks.

“I do know what you mean now,” I tell him, “But also, are you just saying banal over and over because you want to have anal?”

He laughs so hard he spits out his wine and it drips purple down his chin. He laughs so hard he farts. “That’s an off-rhyme, you freak.”

My bedroom has not changed since we first met, a fact that for some reason I now find disturbing. His body has, though. It is still thick, but not so much as before. We’ve all lost weight; almost no one has enough to eat. He is not tall, only about five-ten, with a former footballer’s body. Broad shoulders and a stout neck.

When we met, his belly protruded about the same distance as his behind. Back then, the comfort of his body, of its weight, surprised me. I was generally nervous around men and, before we became intimate, I felt keenly aware of both his strength and my ignorance as to how he would wield it. But I found that I loved to nestle into the pillow of his chest. Though the taper of his shoulders to his waist was quite pronounced and stereotypically masculine, his round softness struck me as almost feminine.

He crawls into my bed and we lie side by side, kissing and tuning one another’s bodies until I swing a leg over him, guiding his hands to my waist. I lean over and press my lips to his, feel his tongue fill my mouth. When I am close to coming, I roll over to stave it off and he follows to top me.

We are everything the storm is not. Steady and gentle. Pressing like a tide ebbing up the shore and we are both sea, both sand. Lapping higher, surrendering under. For a moment I remember the way my grandmother used to comfort me during thunderstorms, pulling me onto her lap in a rocking chair.

I hear his breath deepen, become more labored. “Come in me,” I whisper against his ear. “Let’s make a baby.” He is close, so I say it again. I clench and unclench my pelvic floor so that we finish together, both huffing, a sea receding.

After, he stares at the ceiling. “That doesn’t really work for me anymore.”

“What doesn’t?”

“The baby thing.”

I nod, but he can’t see, and I don’t know what to say. The air has become heavy. Simply in an effort to dissipate its heft, I ask “Why didn’t you say anything? It’s been almost a month.”

“I don’t know. Because it has been such a long time? I didn’t want to make you feel bad. And at first it still kinda did, because it reminded me of us Before. Kinda. But, it’s been like ten years?”

“Right.” I swallow shame down and turn my gaze to study the ceiling, too.

“I still came,” he reassures me, and I wince, “And it’s sweet that you remembered that I used to like that. I think it’s just the fact that it’s probably not an option now? To have kids. Or at least it would be a disaster—I mean, that’s what I think. I know some people are still about it. But not me, not now. I don’t…You know I already kind of felt like I shouldn’t have kids Before, and now…” His throat catches, “It just makes me sad.”

“I get it,” I say. And I do. I want to tell him that my period has not come in almost a year. That whether we should or should not, I, at least, can’t. I’m quite sure. I was hardly surprised when it stopped. The stress of doom is significant, and I’ve never thought of my body as resilient. It was a clear signal: my line would end with me.

But I don’t tell him. I allow him to take my hand and wait for him to fall asleep, resentment building in my chest. I am not sure from where it comes, only that he is oblivious.

***

Bumble brought us together originally. We ended up on a first date eating Thai food at some random Upper East Side restaurant because of an algorithm that nobody really understands. To me, dating usually felt meaningless and arbitrary, neither choice nor fate.

Babies came up on our second date. Not the idea of having them together, just having them in general. I was twenty-five and it felt mature, radical to say things like, “I feel like I shouldn’t have children because I’d be birthing them into the apocalypse, but I’m pretty sure I want one anyway.”

He nodded gravely when I said this. We sat on a bench in Fort Tryon overlooking the Hudson. It was spring, the year quarantine thawed with the ground and I had only been kissed once since before the pandemic. Memes about a Hot Vax Summer surged the internet, but I wasn’t sure I would remember how to fuck.

At the time, I believed I used the word “apocalypse” to signal my cynicism. Looking back, I’m astounded by my naivete, my denial at the reality of my own words. The way I deluded myself into believing that I was “facing it.” How short ten years is. That’s what they say now. It was always a problem of our conceptualizing scale.

He felt the same way, he said then, “For me it’s partially the apocalypse and just the world being fucked up in general, obviously. But then it’s also just remembering what a shit kid I was and just being like, I can’t deal with that.” He lifted his palms like weighted scales and bobbed his head along with them, “But then, I’m like, I want to raise a little basketball star.”

“For sure,” I said, laughing. I felt compelled to restrain myself in the conversation, the old pressure to perform as a Cool Girl still unshakeable and, as a white girl reared in the age of lean-in feminism, the strength of my desire to mother felt somehow anti-feminist. I interpreted the dreams he shared of fatherhood as a seductive performance and felt determined not to reward it with visible swooning.

So, it surprised me when, weeks later, in a vulnerable, postcoital moment, he asked me, “Can you tell me to come in you next time we have sex? Like, say you want a baby.”

“Um, but we use condoms?”

“I know. I know we aren’t actually, obviously. It just kind of gets me off.”

I considered this. “I don’t know. I can tell you to come in me, but it makes me feel kind of weird to say I want a baby when, like, I don’t. I mean, not right now. Plus, that just feels… so straight.”

He chuckled. “Ok. You don’t have to, obviously.”

I kissed his face. “That’s the unfreakiest freaky thing I’ve ever heard.”

He laughed his most booming laugh. It always shocked me, then and now. Like a thunderclap.

Soon, I warmed to the idea. During sex, I would whisper in his ear about babymaking, despite the condom and the fact that neither of us wanted to have a baby then or with each other. The intimacy blurred the lines of fantasy for me. I became unsure whether we were fantasizing about being a couple who wanted a baby together, or whether in fantasizing about having a baby together, we became that couple.

One morning at breakfast, he caught me eyeing the two-year-old at the table next to us.

“Why don’t we just make one of those?” he asked me. I checked his face to see if he was kidding. He was.

“Ok, I feel like I need to say this,” I said, lowering my voice as if to shield the still-new mother nearby, “If I accidentally got pregnant right now, I would for sure get an abortion.”

“Yes, I know that,” he held up his palms and giggled. “I know that’s what you would want to do and I totally support that. It’d definitely be the right thing.” He stuck a homefry in his mouth and glanced at the top-left corner of nothing, “Ok, it’d probably be the right thing.”

I laughed, tossing my napkin across the table at him, “You know, you better be careful, you could actually convince me.” He raised his eyebrows. “We don’t even know each other that well!” I continued, “And we both make like no money, we’d be fucked.”

He shrugged, forking another bite from his plate. “I mean, my parents raised me on 40k and I turned out okay. You just figure it out”

My cheeks grew hot and I nodded. “True.

***

Outside, the storm barrels on. The apartment has remained inhabitable by pure luck; the building was old enough to be made of the sturdy plaster and lathe that came before drywall, but new enough that the tenants could afford pulling together the money for this system. When I moved here, the sound of block parties used to drown out my TV. Now, the storms fill the space their music occupied, leaving me aching for the fuzzy thrum of a half-blown base.

I use Marcus’s left arm as a pillow and seal my ear against the tender skin of his bicep, the whoosh of his blood muffling the shrieking wind, the breaking city. His right arm lolls lazily across my waist and I place it the way I like: tucked underneath my own so that his elbow rests just above my belly button, his wrist at my breastbone. I hold his hand with both of mine near my throat the way a child holds a stuffed animal.

We had been dating for almost a year when he broke things off. The casualness of the relationship had shifted from authentic and freeing to forced and insincere. We both noticed this, but when I addressed it by committing, he presented a revelation: there was someone else, and he chose her.

I tried to take it gracefully. I told myself that this was New York City and that it would not be hard to come by another Bumble boy who could make me laugh and come. I told myself even as I turned away from the others the algorithm offered to replace him. As months turned to years and the floods came and The End set in, I spent innumerable hours regretting the moment I let him leave, the fact that I didn’t fight for it: I simply hugged him goodbye in his car and said, “Life is long. Maybe we will circle back.”

***

Ten years later, on a rare and sunny day, I took a walk to the Community Center. I don’t know what it was that triggered my recognition that day—the sound of his laugh, booming but somehow girlish in its throaty giggles, or the sight of it, his shoulders drawn up and bouncing like a cartoon.

I stood in the doorway of the Center and looked across the playground outside: a group of teenagers played basketball on the court, a young family picnicked on the platform of the monkey bars. A team of storm suits must have sterilized the whole area that morning, I thought. And, as though the thought had summoned them, two people in storm suits emerged from a box truck parked on the street just beyond the playground fence. One said something, the other laughed, and I glimpsed someone I had missed.

“Hey!” I shouted it before I had consciously decided to. My voice sounded unfamiliar to me, strangled and desperate.

The two suited people carrying their box turned. The young couple did, too. One of the teenagers neglected a pass and I watched the ball bounce off of his chest and onto the ground. All of us waited, wondering why I had yelled. Just as soon as I registered whom I had recognized, I simultaneously grew terrified that I had been wrong. I dreaded the transformation of that suited form back into a stranger.

But then the two people lowered the box to the ground and he took a couple steps forward and I knew for sure. That gait: lumbering but deliberate. At the edge of the sanitation zone he stopped and I watched—fascinated, my first view of a suit’s dismembering—until he stood as near-naked and vulnerable as the rest of us, left his pile at that perimeter and continued towards me.

He wrapped his arms around me, squeezing me against his chest. I melted.

“I’m alone,” I mumbled. I felt immediately embarrassed, but it was also the only thing to say. His body slackened around me and I remembered this as a sign that a hug was ending. We separated.

“I need to finish with the last of the goods, make sure everything is stocked up. It’ll probably take me like thirty. Are you good to wait?”

I nodded, holding back tears. I felt self-conscious but, looking around, realized I needn’t be. The people around us had already turned back to their own activities. Over the years, the drama of these reunions had faded to commonplace. After the first few floods, the reclamation of surviving loved ones was celebrated by all as a sign of hope. By now, we had all lost and gained and lost again. To a certain extent, all that love comes out in the wash.

“I’m glad to see you’re not missing any opportunities to flaunt that suit,” I said. I caught my breath, realizing that he probably didn’t remember the conversation I was referencing anymore.

He picked it up. “You know it. And did you hear the good news? Supreme’s supply chain collapsed like one year into the floods, so they haven’t been able to make anymore.”

“Of fucking course they’re one of the companies whose heads went straight to bunkers.”

“Uh huh. But at least it staves off my suicide.”

I laughed and it tasted like fresh water.

We walked the mile back to my apartment together slowly. There were people everywhere on days like this. Safe days. They came paled and squinting from their dwellings to play music and dance and eat together in the spaces marked as sanitized. I thought of my family, locked down in a bunker that my father had secured through a professional connection. I wondered if they ever danced.

“So,” he asked me, reading my thoughts, “Why aren’t you home?”

The answer was quite simple: my father had decided that I could not move into the bunker with him, my mother, and my sister. “This is the most rational thing,” my father had told me by way of my mother. Her voice wavered when she spoke, but I knew the firmness of its source. “We can’t let our emotions sully our chance at survival.” My apartment was relatively safe, he reasoned, and he had a Manhattan connection that could siphon away monthly rations from a private distribution network for me. That way, I didn’t strain their Boston network or risk revealing the bunker location by traveling to them.

I didn’t want to explain to Marcus that my family had abandoned me, though I knew it would be obvious, so I demurred, “Not yet. What time did you get up to start sanitizing this morning?”

He paused and, thankfully, decided not to press me. He told me about the other folks in his volunteer unit, the way they’d spend the night together before sunny days so that they could rise before dawn and create sanitation zones for people to play in. He told me about the way they had found one another as The End set in: fellow loners suited up on deserted streets. As some of the only people who could move about safely, they answered the unasked task of removing bodies, of collecting and redistributing resources.

“We had to take this Center over from a militia,” he told me, “But honestly, it wasn’t the battle you’d think. They only had two guys with suits, so we just squeezed them out of shelter real slow and – ” he grimaced, “That was that.”

“It’s kind of wild the way you all, with the store and everything, were able to plug into this regional network and that it’s actually working,” I said.

“’Working’ is generous,” he said, an edge to his voice. “People are close to starving. It’s thin coverage.”

We’d come to my building and I bent to sit on the stoop, breathing hard. At this point, the remaining private networks only comfortably sustain the people they were designed to serve—the people in bunkers—and I probably only get a couple more meals a month than if I did not have the connection at all. I am down to about 100 pounds I’d guess, down from a healthy 135, and I hadn’t walked that far in months.

“I think I just meant it’s wild that you all have been able to get this system functioning relatively peacefully,” I said, once I caught my breath.

He eyed me. “Is it? Wild? I don’t believe you think that.”

Again, I avoided his question, opening the door to my building and beckoning him inside. Before things escalated, with The End I mean, abandoning class in the name of saving the planet seemed a romantic and noble endeavor. Although it was practical, urgent, and overdue, those of us who abandoned our excess (or at least purported to) retained the narrative that our actions were radical. We fancied ourselves martyrs.

Unfortunately, privilege rejects the reality that sustains it like a magnet repels its sameness. No matter how much evidence we faced, I don’t think those of us with resources to renounce ever internalized the idea that we might do right and not reap reward, act justly and still suffer. I imagined a safe and simple life in a saved and stabilized climate. Instead, I found myself hiding from knee-deep water in an apartment I moved into seven years ago, completely dependent but barely surviving on meals sent by the very connections I once swore to sever.

That day of our reunion, time folded against itself like an accordion, mercifully disappearing the years we had been separated into some distant place. Away, too, went the end of our relationship. I tend to reference it casually with self-deprecating jokes that begin with, “After you dumped me…” and he laughs and shakes his head.

I have somewhat successfully convinced myself that he has not provided more of an explanation because it is no longer relevant. I have less successfully convinced myself that I do not mind.

Now for the first time, I allow myself to spiral into the questions I have been avoiding: Who is she? Had she left him? Or maybe she hadn’t survived the floods. I think of the catch in his voice just moments ago: That doesn’t really work for me anymore…the baby thing.

What if they had had a child together and the child had died and that was why the relationship had fallen apart? I imagine a little girl squirming out of a faceless mother’s arms and running to him as he opens the door, reaching for him despite his backing away and his warnings not to come too close, stepping onto the place from which his boots had just retreated before her mother can catch her.

It would have only taken a few drops of the storm surge to soak through her soft baby feet and poison her blood, only minutes for her organs to sink into sepsis. Adults could sometimes withstand minute contact, depending on the toxicity levels. They would often fall ill for days or weeks, sometimes with lasting side-effects, but they would live. Children, on the other hand, were highly susceptible. Tens of thousands had died following the first flood, before we understood. A wave of suicides followed.

I picture him and the mother of his daughter inconsolable, blaming each other. If she hadn’t let the child out of her arms, if he had not gone out that day. This must have been the reason, I think, that he moved with his own parents from the Bronx to Manhattan. It makes so much sense. My eyes well up at my own imagination and I squeeze his sleeping hand, accidentally waking him.

I twist my body around to face him. He blinks his eyes open and shuts them again, raising his eyebrows, asking, what?

“Remember the last night we saw each other?” I asked, “Before, I mean.”

He scoots his body down in the bed so that his face is level with mine. “Are you thinking about how neither of us has talked about the time in between?”

I nod. I draw in a breath. “Have you lost anyone close to you?”

A minute shake of his head, and I exhale. The little girl, the painful death and the fight that followed, I was wrong.

“I guess I’m surprised,” I say, “that you are so decided in not wanting children. I pegged you as the type who would be on the procreation train. Especially because your family’s around to help. You still have community.”

“It’s not that,” he says. “It’s more that Before, having a child, creating life, that was the most dramatic thing you could do. You know? It was life-altering. The stakes were so high in making that choice. And I guess that’s what I got off to…when you’d whisper that. The way life could rush at you back then.”

“So, it’s like the dying in banality, but birthing banality.”

“Yeah, I guess it’s just that before our lives were the stakes.” He has closed his eyes now and yawns through his words, “And those stakes felt so high. And now…whole ecosystems are at stake and they’re collapsing and we’re just…powerless. We’re nothing.”

“But that was—”

“Always kind of the case, yeah, I know. I guess this is the proof that as much as I said it, I didn’t believe it before.”

I nod. Me too. For the first time in years, I want to debate on the side of hope. Maybe, I think, maybe my period will return. Now that there is another body around me, a little more food in me. Laughter. Sex. Maybe with the storms stabilizing, I will, too. Maybe in a few years we will be the young family picnicking at the center’s playground, disinterested in the drama of a young couple who broke things off too soon finding each other again in a place they hardly recognize.

I think about pointing out to him that yes, there are the people in the bunkers sapping and hoarding resources so that they might die more comfortably, but there are also people working on restoration, striking a careful and loving balance of tending land and letting it alone so that it can grow back toward itself. People like him, organizing meager networks of food which source the Community Center where he serves, the Center where we met again. There are the patches of earth that are far enough from toxic epicenters and high enough from floods and stable enough not to slide and wet enough not to burn. There are enough of those places that many experts have predicted scenarios in which humans do pull through this, endangered for generations but not extinct. If we had children, it is possible that our kin might see a healthy, inhabitable Earth.

His voice interrupts my thoughts. “Do you remember what you said to me in the car? The night we broke up?” I do remember, but I am embarrassed, so I just press my lips together and stare back at him.

“’Life is long, maybe we will circle back.’” He chuckles now the way he did Before, back in that other time that was also already the end.

about the Author

Montana Bass (she/her) lives in New York. She is a full-time sex educator and a sometimes writer and dancer.

about the artist

Lindsey Morrison Grant: Self-identifying as a neurodivergent, two-spirit, elder storyteller and contrarian deeply rooted in the roar and lore of what's become known as Portlandia of The Left Coast, they attribute success and survival to superlative supports, mindfulness practice, and daily creative expression in words, sounds, and images. While their visual work is represented by The SIY GALLERY of San Francisco, their literary works fly in and out of calendar pages and email boxes in search of empathetic editors and progressive publishing houses upon which to roost.