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Betty and the Storm

 Betty takes a mercifully long drag on her All-American Stag, feeling the Kansas breeze. It’s a beautiful summer day with big sky country blueness everywhere and only faint, grey-streaked clouds far off on the horizon. Betty loves prairie storms, how they turn her world into blues and blacks cut ragged by hungry lightning. That familiar, lovely earthy smell that lingers even after the clouds have gone southward, down to the more welcomingly humid gulf. 


A bit of incoming stormy wind snaps at the clothes on the line and Betty stands sighing and a halfway laconic smile, feeling long hours of chore caused aches lessening with each puff of the Stag. Reaching out a hand to fix one of Teddy’s work shirts, Betty unclips it, hoping to smooth the wrinkles with an absent hand as she turns again to watch the storm roll in. 


When Betty sees it, it’s almost slippery in her vision. Like she’s got something in her jade green eyes, something that makes focus hard and dizzying. Betty squints. Scrunches her nose in the way that drives Teddy crazy. But it’s there. It’s real. 


A spaceship.  That’s what it is. A chrome cylinder big as the battleships she watched roll into harbor when her parents lived by the sea. Smooth. Featureless. Alien. It throws half the prairie into shadow, and the first lightning strikes inside those far away thunderheads become dramatic and vivid, wild snapping illuminations as if war is being fought far away. The ship drifts. Silent as a dream. Betty is entranced by the sight, unaware of how it makes her sway side to side. 


It is the most beautiful thing Betty has ever seen. A flawless metallic Angel larger than whole cities. When the first squadron of jets slams overhead, flying fast and low and angry, Betty falters to the ground from their outgoing pursuit. Their scream deafens, disorients; and in seconds they’ve become distant looking insects like angry clockwork wasps spoiling for a fight. A dozen more follow, then a dozen after that, more and more until Betty thinks it’s Armageddon, face half buried in the freshly cut grass. Her damaged ears barely register a shrill, ominous sine rising. 


She watches. Wide eyed. The spaceship drifts, unaware or uncaring of its assailants. The incoming storm is suddenly real, close enough that the foreign leviathan plunged headlong inside, illuminated by snarling electrical outbursts. In awe Betty watches the jets follow, caught between black storm and fierce sunshine. 


Seconds tick by. 


When Betty sees the storm blossom from the inside out with silent, billowing green fire, she knows a different storm altogether has come.

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