Читать книгу Twister - Genanne Walsh - Страница 11

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People speak of the quality of the light. Not the dark greenish sky of extremity but its precursor: slightly overcast but bringing a clarity that makes everything—trees, houses, sidewalk cracks, cars lined in a parking lot—eerily distinct, strangely beautiful.

Some liken it to the light during a partial eclipse. The degree of brightness changes. As if the diffuse light of the sun gives way and the moon takes over, no matter the time of day. A cooler eye, sharper outlines. Images imprint and linger on the retina. A mundane afternoon feels like eight o’clock on a summer evening and, a switch flipped, you crave an ice pop. Twister weather, the old ones say, meaning, perhaps, twister light—but they’re proven wrong as many times as right.

Citizens with experience might begin to assess the proximity of shelter. But many do not. It is, some say, intoxicating to feel newness in a world you think you know so well, to be reminded of its otherness. An average middle-aged woman will see a shadow cast by a power line on Main Street and think of her long-lost father: young, mowing the backyard in a white t-shirt, so alive that each blade of grass vies for attention while beyond, a mile away, noted but judged no immediate threat, a funnel cloud meanders gracefully through an empty field.

Of course reason prevails. Minds turn to the quiet spaces that usually sit forgotten. Many people nowadays do not have storm shelters. A basement will do very nicely; or bathtubs, interior closets. These spaces take an imperceptible inhale of possibility. Before the day is out Louise Logan and two other bank employees will shelter surrounded by safety deposit boxes in the hushed cloistered space of the vault. Portentous, padded with valuables and legal documents and lit by long white fluorescent bars, the vault is a church of secrets.