A Lullaby of Thunder

[995 words]

It had been thirty years since we’d had a storm like that one, or so my pappy told me. He said I was too young to know how it felt like to experience thunder as it truly was: raw noise without the echo of gunshots. The war had been raging for the past 50 years—and he liked to count out those numbers for me every chance he had. Finally when the trees stopped shaking and sky stopped growling, me and pappy were able to go outside and scavenge for anything we could use. We knew everyone was hoping the storm would knock their neighbor’s supplies into their own yard and that it’d be easier to rob each other without getting caught. “My land, my rules,” was the general consensus in this town.

“Pappy, let’s go! It’s over. Ain’t no more winds blowin’ out there.” I picked up the shotgun as quietly as I could, but he had eyes in the back of his head and swung around, pushing the barrel to the ground.

“Whaddya think you’re doing, girl?” With one hand, he grabbed the weapon from my grasping hands, which had barely been able to hold the incredible weight of the gun anyway. Unfair. All the neighborhood boys had one. “You may be thirteen, but I don’t think you’re ready yet to be totin’ weapons like that.” I opened my mouth to protest. “Ah-ah-ah! Don’t tell me that all they boys getta so why shouldn’t you—their mothers are fools for letting their sons use weapons.”

Pappy was old-fashioned like that. But I knew protesting wouldn’t help because right now was prime time rush. We had to grab what we could before we got robbed blind. Too bad Pappy still insisted on a moral compass. I, for one, knew that we lived in a world where survival meant more than courtesy. This was war, not the peacetime of decades past.

“Fine,” I spouted. Wrapping my short blond hair back in a ponytail, I nodded at the door. “Let’s get out there so we can stock up.”

“Tell me the rule first.”

Morals, morals, morals. I tried not to roll my eyes. “Don’t take what ain’t yours, or they’ll take your head off for sure. But—”

“Not another word. Let’s go.”

“Yes, sir.”

I had learned over the years that there was no point in arguing with Pappy.

As the door swung open, it became clear that the warzone was very much alive. People were runnin’ here and there, grabbin’ things, punchin’ one another, yellin’, but I hadn’t heard any gunshots yet so everything was still safe and civil so far. In our yard, our neighbor’s sour apple tree had dropped nearly a dozen of the red fruits all about, many of them rolling into the empty swimming pool.

“Pappy!” I hissed, pointing. I hadn’t had an apple in… well… since my tenth birthday, I think.

But he gave his head a stern shake. “Ain’t ours, little girl. We need to clean the rubble off of the garden.”

I nodded. Now wasn’t the time to disobey orders, I reminded myself. I ran to the back and began to clear off the fallen tree branches. Our garden was our pride and joy. Four feet by four feet in size, it was the biggest in the whole town and Pappy often had to shoot intruders who thought they could steal a bite. Sometimes he’d let me use the gun, but the idea overall seemed to haunt him.

I began tossing the trash and rubble from the storm off to the side, into the dirt that composed most of our back yard.

“See that splintered limb?” Pappy called out to me from the other side of the yard, where he was doing God knows what.

“Yeah.”

“Bring that in—we can use it for firewood in the night time.”

“Sure.”

I reached for the log and paused. It reminded me of one of the children who had tried to steal from our garden. Parents often sent their kids to get food because they thought kids were less likely to be shot, but that was a pitiful idea. The boy had been small, thin, and quick. I had been on shotgun watch then. Before even thinking to scare him off, my instincts had kicked in—I balanced the shotgun on the window and bang! Like a storm rips a limb off a tree, without thought or care, I tore that boy away from his family with a single bullet.

He could’ve been me. But he wasn’t me.

Finally the junk was cleared from the garden so I looked to Pappy for instruction, but he was distracted.

The apples!

There was no way our neighbors would climb into our empty pool to get their fruit back. If I didn’t take them, they’d just rot anyway. There were apples on the ground everywhere! I could take one or two without notice.

So I slid into the empty pool and turned my shirt up into a bag, filling it with bruised fruit. Halfway through my collecting I felt something soft in my hand. Not an apple, but a dead bird, tossed among the sea of red like a hopeless casualty of the storm’s meaningless violence. I hadn’t ever seen a bird before, except in pictures. It was so… frail. I decided I didn’t like it.

“What are you doing?” Pappy shouted, and I started as I noticed him staring down at me.

“There was a bird,” I said stupidly, hoping he wouldn’t notice the apples I had grabbed.

He shook his head, looking confused and annoyed. “A dead bird in a swimming pool? That’s going to be you if you don’t get out of there right now and go back inside.”

“Yes, sir.” Meekly, I grabbed one final apple and climbed out, thinking of how Pappy said he had never liked storms, but I had never lived a life without ’em.