Phobia

The sky darkened in the west as the wind picked up and the birds stopped singing their merry songs. Something ominous was approaching…

Anna sat, with her feet up, quietly reading her book. She had not been paying attention to the time and had passed most of the afternoon away, absorbed in the enticing novel she had been reading. She had been unable to put it down, except to go to the kitchen to refill her coffee mug, or to the bathroom because of the coffee consumption.

She was having trouble reading the words, her only light having come from the sun flowing through her dining room window. Glancing at her watch, she realized it was nearly dinner time. She wondered at the darkness this early in the evening and reluctantly, put her book down.

It took a few seconds and several groans to get up from the chair she had been occupying for hours. She took small steps until she was finally able to straighten her back and stand upright. She had gotten used to the aches and pains of early-onset arthritis and it came as nothing more than a fleeting thought as she came to a halt in front of the window.

Moving the curtains aside, she was able to see the sky in the south, but had to press her forehead against the glass and crane her neck a bit to see what the western sky was producing. Anna didn’t like what she saw. Stepping back quickly, she nearly tripped over her cat, in an effort to move toward the door.

“Damn cat”, she muttered, “always in the way.”

She stepped over the sleeping feline, already feeling guilty for cussing her. Moshi was her constant companion for the last two years; since the last of her three children moved from home. Their father had been gone much longer than that.

As Anna reached the door, she heard the first few drops of rain hitting the roof. Hurriedly, she swung the inside door open and pushed against the outside screen door, turning the knob simultaneously. It gave behind her ample weight and she looked toward the sky again. She still wasn’t satisfied with her viewpoint and moved over the threshold to her porch, disregarding the sprinkle of rain.

Her heart immediately skipped a beat and then began pounding dramatically in her chest. Her hand went to her mouth, causing the screen door to slam behind her. Anna didn’t flinch at the sound; she was far too enthralled with the clouds building around her.

Anna was not native to the area. She had moved from Colorado, with her husband, in the early 1980’s. Nebraska weather had always been difficult for her to adjust to. The wet winters, nearly void of snow the last few years, were incomparable to the beautiful blowing and drifting snow she had known growing up in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Nebraska summers were pretty enough, with nature coloring the fields a luscious green, but the humidity was almost more than Anna could bear.

Anna often swore she would move back to Colorado when the kids were older, but when Dick died, she’d saved all her resources just to raise the children. Her babies had since moved on to their own lives, and her roots were now in Nebraska because of it. She couldn’t bring herself to move knowing she would seldom see her children if she did. Instead, she continued to teach grade school, doing what she chose to with her summers.

In the last two years, she'd taken up crafting. When she wasn’t involved with that, she was either surfing the web on her new computer, or reading; anything to pass the hot, humid days away until school began again.

Her fear of the summer storms grew in intensity with each passing year. It all began on a family camping trip when the kids were still quite small. They'd all been enjoying themselves fishing, swimming and playing games on a typical July afternoon. During a conversation with her sister in law, Anna had glanced toward the western end of the lake and stopped talking in mid sentence, realizing that something didn’t look quite right.

Parallel to the western shore of the lake, a line of clouds appeared to be rolling swiftly toward their campsite. The clouds stretched across the sky from north to south. Behind the line were darker clouds carrying, what looked to be, dust along with them. Anna and her sister in law had sat watching for a few moments. As the cloud line continued toward them, they were able to see that the “dust” was actually heavy rain. Anna commented that the clouds looked much like they were rolling back up into themselves.

Seconds later, she remembered, a strong wind came up. The campsite became alive with activity as everyone raced to close camper vents and windows, zip up tent flaps, reel in fishing lines and prepare for the worst. Anna had never experienced anything like that before and was shaking badly as she tried to carry out the menial tasks. She had heard the word “tornado” and instantly knew they couldn’t ride the storm out in the camper.

Anna, Dick and the kids had arrived at the campsite first and had been able to pick a spot closest to the lake. The lake’s edge was only about fifteen feet away from the door of their camper. She had been suddenly concerned that a strong gust could easily push the camper off in to the deep waters of the wide bay where they were camped.

Grabbing her purse, she had jumped out of the camper, shutting the door behind her and racing around to the rest of the group. Anna could only remember bits and pieces of what happened after that. She remembered holding all of her children together, behind the wall of a picnic shelter, and telling them she loved them because she knew they were all about to die. Large hail came down at some point, and she remembered the deafening sound as it hit the tin roof of the shelter. She remembered nothing else until the storm was over and she was observing the mess it had made of their campsite.

Anna and her family survived after all, but she was never the same because of the experience. Later reports told of a tornado touching down on the other side of the lake, but none of Anna’s group had seen it because they had been huddled under the picnic shelter.

As years passed, Anna experienced several more “close calls”, all of which were traumatic for her. She found herself running around the house, from window to window, watching the weather for years after that. At first her kids thought it was funny to see their mother acting so absurd because of little rain showers. Once she woke them, in the middle of the night, and made them all go downstairs where she thought it might be safer. Later, it was discovered, a gust of wind whistling through her bedroom window was what caused her to be frightened. There hadn’t even been any clouds that night, but she couldn’t be sure because it had been so dark.

Summers passed, the kids grew older and were soon tired of their mother hunting them down all over the neighborhood, dragging them home and making them be quiet while she listened to the radio and ran from room to room with her eyes to the sky. Anna realized she was probably giving them a complex, but she couldn’t seem to help herself. She had developed a phobia, but nobody understood that.

Now here she was, standing alone in the rain, looking up at the sky and knowing her time was at hand. Her immediate thoughts were to run back in to the house and call her kids, which she actually started to do, but stopped herself just inside the door.

“They already think I've lost my mind”, she thought sadly, and she could picture them rolling their eyes at her and telling her to “chill out”.

With one more glance over her shoulder, she closed the door. The rains were now quite heavy and she could hear it gushing out of the gutters, from along the eaves of her house, and forming puddles in her flowerbeds. Walking slowly, as if planning each step, Anna went back to her chair and sat down. She didn’t turn on the radio. She didn’t turn on the television. She didn’t run from window to window trying to watch the sky. She just picked up her book and tried to read in the darkened room. Her body was never recovered.

A fear of tornados is very real to some people. It is called lilapsophobia.