Category: The Storm

Mo doesn’t want me to tell you this, but I once had sex with his wife, before she was his wife, but while I knew he was in love with her, and I don’t know if I can ever live that down. Now I am married, and happily I may add, and I don’t want anyone other than you to know. I am a sonofabitch.
Today, he wants me to kiss his ass though, and I am not married to her, so I refuse. He wants everyone to bow down to the holy Clower ass, and we all rise up, and say no. Each and every one of us.
I am so sorry to you, dear readers, but not to him. He’s an asshole and I just want all of you to know that.

It’s hard to not love New York City, even after your twenties are long gone. In the approaching autumn of that year I found myself there again and was transported back to post-college-graduation. The world as a proverbial oyster. Surely, NYC would come, but the job was at a newspaper, back home, in suburban North Carolina; just a step on the road to the Times and a loft in the Village. So, in that year, my early thirties, I found myself in New York again, ostensibly for a tennis tournament, and a few drinks with almost-lost friends. A storm was approaching up the coast, skirting the coast with a bump and then back out into the water, where it would build steam and head back inland. Thousands south of the city, including those in the town I then called home, were without power, many without homes. I found myself in NYC oblivious to the storm except the blips of it on cable TV news. In my mind, the city was covered in a protective seal that kept out such things as storms and locust infestations (the last of which could be correct).
My name is Moses Clower, or Mo as I like to be called – gets past the biblical implications which I have come to find problematic, and once made for an immediate launch in to the realm of the “academically gifted” as a child when I became the first in my class to know how to spell his name. I have been divorced for four years, six months ago I jumped from the sinking ship of newspapers (my passion; my blood – I thought) to a job in online journalism for a major 24-hour news network. I am 37 years old and have no dog, no children, and I do have a retirement portfolio that would turn no heads: women at the bar, financial advisers.
That weekend, as the storm approached, Labor Day weekend, I spent in NYC feeling like a kid again. It’s okay to say kid from this vantage point, because that is where the longing is – to be a kid again – but, what I really felt was like a young adult again (freedoms of an adult, no adult responsibilities) – what I would of called when I was actually a kid “an adult,” or simply “old” which makes me wonder what I would have thought as a kid of myself now. But that’s neither here nor there, or perhaps it is one or the other, but either way I was in NYC feeling like a “kid,” drinking with old college friends who I felt had somehow found the holy grail, but, as it turns out, were in similar positions as myself and my non-NYC friends, and it made the city seem smaller. And in making the city seem smaller, it made it more appealing to me, as I had long given up on the notion of making it there, and through giving up on the notion, had soon given up on the desire. A NYC that was not so overwhelming, didn’t feel like it could crush a person, alighted new fires of yearning in me – and those drinks, and those walks, and those views from that hotel room, and those women, all those different women, after these lonely past four years, seemed to sound the siren’s call.

For days, Richard has been reading the weather reports, watching the weather reports, researching weather phenomenon on the internet: wikipedia, NOAA, weather.com, various weather related blogs. Even before anyone else on the east coast knew anything about Nolan, old Dick was already buying canned goods, bread, bottled water, beer, whiskey, nudey magazines, a diesel powered generator, a prepaid cell phone. The weather radio already works on batteries, as well as AC.
Ashley left him back in the spring, long before hurricane season. His heart has never been the same, as anyone that knew the two of them would suspect. He has been obsessed with the things that he really cannot control since then, but they are all things that he thinks, through a more perfect understanding, he will be able to control. For him, it is not turning on and off the light switch an odd number of times, that’s too easy. It’s these weather phenomenon, and when a storm of this size and shape is on the loose, he is in his heyday.
Ashley left with the guy who designs the charts and graphs, the best he can figure, down at Channel 2. Said he’s hung like a horse. Tells Richard, on the night that she walks out, that he never did shit for her in the sack. He always felt like he was attentive, if not overly so.

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Nancy’s in the cedar hall closet waiting for the storm. She hasn’t seen a weather report in days – no weather.com, CNN, or newspaper either. There was just something in the way the clouds were moving when she got up this morning that got her worried, so she called in sick, took the dog to the kennel and is sitting in the cedar closet in the hallway, the one that still smells of cigarettes from when she and her husband used to spend time smoking in bars, and before he died. The cedar has tried, but the cigarettes have won.
It’s the smell of the cigarettes that remind her of him, and thinking of him, and the smell of the cigarettes, makes her want to smoke – but mostly she wants to smoke with him, or be with him, and that’s not a possibilty, so she wishes that she had picked up a pack on the way home from the kennel, before the storm clouds started churning too much, so at least she could smoke, even in the cedar closet. It would make her feel close to him. It looked like the storm would be long and powerful this time.
She didn’t know why he lied to her, and about such easy things. She didn’t know if he was dead, it was just easier to think of him in that way. The military jacket he had worn during the war still hung overhead in the cedar closet, so there was always a possibility. When she thought of the jacket she thought it might be nice if he were not dead, because the jacket was possibility and death was not. She had once decided to live and not the other. It wasn’t taken for granted. The jacket. The cigarette smell. She hadn’t felt this way in a while. If he were dead, surely his ghost was there in the closet. If not, she like to think of him as dead so his ghost could possibly be there in the closet with her.
There was one other storm. It came toward the end. She hid in the closet during that one too. He sat in the living room watching the TV and drinking until the power went out. Then he listened to the emergency radio, the one with the hand crank, and drank until he could not crank the radio. Then he started throwing dishes across the kitchen and yelling his mother’s name. His mother had died the previous spring. His father was dead, or at least dead in the way that he was now dead to her, for many years. The father’s name never crossed the mind. He thought of himself as an immaculate conception. He prayed at night, but the storm still came. His mother’s ghost seem to live with him.

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