Chewbacca Mom - Really?

Ok I'm not being funny or a miserable old git or anything but I just have three words - ChewbaccaMom - really?

If you have spent the last couple of days in a cardboard box or doing something meaningful you may have missed this phenomenon but the 130 million people who checked her out on Facebook clearly haven't.

So Chewbacca Mom is Candace Payne from Texas. She goes to Kohls to get stretch pants but ends up getting a Chewbacca mask instead and takes a selfie as she laughs hysterically. Errr and that's it.

Still, a couple of days later Payne has become a household name. She's carpooling with Star wars director JJ Abrams and is appearing on Good Morning America.

The Washington Post is writing analytical pieces on her transformative role in society.

Payne's video is a "reminder that life is filled with simple pleasures," it states. "Even with all of the negativity in the world, you can drive to Kohl's, buy a toy under $20 and crack yourself up alone in your car. it's uncomplicated, It's not stressful." the Washington Post states.

I have to say I found myself imagining the newsroom and the conference when some editor asked for volunteers to write about the transformative effects of Chewwy Mom. Suddenly all eyes go to the floor and pencils tap nervously.

Back in the day I recall the news editor lobbing a curveball at my features team when he wanted us to write about Dido's Thank You and how it was doing so well because everybody wanted to be happy and smiley and all that nonsense before he disappeared to the bar to drink himself into an angry stupor.

At least Dido had talent on her side and wasn't just famous for cackling to herself in a car. I guess one clutches at straws for amusement in the age of Donald Trump.

Far Away Footie and Liverpool Blues

One of the worst deprivations I face living in the USA is watching footie from afar. I've never been a big fan of the U.S. version which features more shoulder pads than an episode of Dynasty, a statement that ages me badly, helmets and lots of stopping and standing around while men fondle odd shaped balls.

Football is called soccer in the US. It always pained me to come to terms with the word but a rather ill-fated episode of coaching under 5s last year, reconciled me more to the S word. I'm not sure if I was a great man (or child motivator for that matter). It's never a good thing when you are celebrating the end of the season at Pizza Hut and the kids start asking who you are. It's a long story really. As part of often acrimonious and unnecessarily costly divorce proceedings, I mentioned a time when the ex had resisted putting the 5-year-old into a local soccer club.

Liverpool manager Jurgen Kopp @ notahappybunny.com

The ex later enrolled him and even volunteered to be a head coach. The pressure was on me to coach an opposing team and I agreed. It soon became clear coaching 5-year-olds was not my bag. The sodden fields of Portsmouth, Virginia seemed a world away from the glory nights of long ago when Liverpool pulled off some of their greatest triumphs in the heart of Europe.

I'm not sure why I started supporting Liverpool but I believe it was a reaction to the elementary school bullies who were promising dire consequences for anyone who wouldn't support Manchester United. Withstanding the daily mortar attacks of snot projected across the class on rulers, it was still worth keeping my principles intact.

Supporting Liverpool was exhilarating and ultimately frustrating but never dull, But from the other side of the pond you often walk alone. Even when you can watch matches down the pub, there is little atmosphere and none of the old cheering and tribalism. The closest I came to recreating the mood was the game between England and the USA in 2010 when Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard scored early on, only for a pathetic fumble by the England goalkeeper to level the score. Watching England is usually an exercise in futility. That world cup was no different.

I had a better feeling yesterday when Liverpool squared up to Sevilla in the Europa Cup final after a breathtaking run in. I quickly ran into logistical problems. The game was scheduled for 7.45p.m. in Britain which was 2.45 p.m. in the United States. That's not an easy time to slip out of work. It was apparently possible to view the game on YouTube, I checked it out and received a message that the service is "not available in your country."

There was nothing for it but to 'watch' the game on live updates on BBC and the Guardian's website, although news of Liverpool's first goal was shared first on Facebook.

I started to wonder if I could get to a pub for the glorious second half. That's when things went slightly pear shaped and Sevilla scored three goals. Even with 10 minutes to go, I half expected a trademark Liverpool escape act.

Then a funny thing happened. Nothing happened.

I felt gutted but at least  had not broken out of jail to watch a fiasco. At some time in the night, I checked my phone and read an Egypt Air jet had disappeared. I started to imagine all those families waiting at the airport for a plane that would never land. it put my footie emptiness firmly into perspective.

My Video Blog Debut

It's hard to believe that in all the six years or so that this blog has been going, I am yet to publish a video blog even though those around me are doing it left, right and center.

So here's me making up for it. This video was taken at my kitchen table and it lasts just over a minute. About 20 seconds of prep went into it. If you are looking for words of wisdom, forget it. Still this does seem to be the way the world is going.

If Samuel Pepys were to be walking around with his famous diary today we'd accuse him of being a pompous old windbag.


Instead of waiting for Dickens' next installment, we'd be 'shove it up on YouTube mate.'

I have shot videos for media companies and anyone else who might be prepared to pay me a pittance for some time now. However, I try not to star in them. This one was taken on my iPhone and YouTube wants to do the shaky reduction on it. . All of which makes me wonder whatever happened to Shakin' Stevens and if he suddenly died would anyone notice. He could be dead already - we might not know. I digress.

I also forgot to do the horizontal thing. There's always next time, right.

Well the video was such fun, it was rapidly followed with Date With Dr. Diaper. This may seem like an irreverant chat, but it's actually a conceptual art project....

On Upnor High Street

Walking down that cobbled street, I started to wonder if I had become a cliche of that kind of American who cherishes the historic. What was Upnor High Street in the grand scheme of things? Little more than an obscure lane leading down to the Medway - a couple of old pubs and some homes clad in traditional Kent weatherboarding. The Old Post Office was just that. The days when letters were sorted here were lost in antiquity. We posed for a picture. We put it on Instagram. We moved on.

There was a smart model of a sloop beyond a crumbling window sill. Daffodils were pushing their way out of the earth in the boxes set out in the shady areas beneath the buildings and we could hear subdued laughter from a pub garden, although it was cold to be outside on that April day, cold but stimulating for the spirits. If you listened carefully maybe you would hear the shoots pushing up through the thin soil.

Upnor seemed like a strange place for a family get together. It also seemed as good a place as any. The street was unremarkable compared to Rye, Stamford, Lavenham, Shaftsbury or a host of other places. It only merits a few lines on Wikipedia and its castle is understated. Even so there was a temptation to don a pair of bright green flannel golfing pants and a pair of white sneakers and yell out "Gee this is so quaint."

What do you expect when your leisure hours are haunted by too many strip malls, too much concrete. Functional is ugly but it is the utilitarian future. What use have we for cobbles anymore? The old sea captain's sloop will rot with the windows. The castle will be shunned and its curtain walls quietly closed off from visitors. It had been five long years since I have been back to Britain and the few days I was there opened and closed and now it's as if I never visited.

But there's something reassuring about finding things the way they are. The old people. Still there for now but just older. The same strange but reassuringly familiar oddities. The same family units, intact and at odds with the fragmented ones I have grown used to. I walked slowly down the high street. I breathed in the thin spring air and the fragile flowers and graceful windows and castle towers. And I wanted to hold onto a slice of it, to bottle it up and take it away with me like the most crass of American collectors.

Z is for Zig Zags

There is nothing new under the sun. Although the brief episode known as Mankind may have seemed like an aberration or an experiment, it was not unique. For two million years after the demise of humans, the world buzzed and hummed in a perpetual food chain, but no one species returned to dominance. Then it zig-zagged back again.

The climatic crisis of the 21st Century had been a mere blip in the rise and fall of the earth. It only took a few thousands of years for the carbon to retreat. In the overall history of the planet, it would pale into insignificance compared to the radiation explosions of the sun before its eventual demise that would boil the oceans and waste any flora and fauna that remained. That happy event was still hundreds of millions of years away. The next people to dominate the world were a species of lizard called the Karnika. On the face of it, they were unprepossessing. Their eyes were overlarge and oozed blue gunk night and day. They had four legs but, like man, later stood up. Even this was not a pretty sight because the Karnika had one scaly leg that was longer than the other, making it difficult to escape from their enemies. Due to their vulnerability, they used their cunning to make up for their lack of athleticism.

In a Karnika village on a land mass that was known as South America a long time ago, the return of Boubus, had caused quite a stir. Boubus was the child of the chief who had disappeared into the forest a year ago to 'find himself.' Everyone in the village assumed he would be killed by a big cat or one of the other nefarious creatures that inhabited the forest, but one day he returned.

He had a horse with him and was dragging a cage full of exotic monkeys. But the return of Boubus was less remarkable than the contraption that was carried behind the cart. Wooden slats had been put together in an outlandish spherical design. The contraption rolled behind the horse.

A group of womenfolk gathered in the village square. The return of Boubus made them emotional. There was enough eye oozing going on to create a mound of ooze in the square that Boubus tactfully pulled his cart around.

His family and the elders of the village embraced him and then turned to the contraption.

"Can you see the ease of movement?" he cried. "Imagine how this will revolutionize our village and make it easier to harvest the crops."

His father mounted a rock with his smaller leg on the surface and his other leg on the ground. That way he attained some stature and equilibrium. "I am so proud of my lost son," he told the gathering crowd. "He went away into the jungle and came back with something wonderful. This is progress."

He pushed the cart and it moved forward. The motion caused his lizard nostrils to puff up and emit little squeaks of delight. He pushed it again and giggled..

So that's the A-Z Challenge zipped up for another year. This one was hard due to time constraints. A few posts were late but it wasn't the end of the world...

Y is for Year 2500

Four hundred years after the demise of man, there were few indications that he, or she, had ever walked on the earth.

Modern humans had only been on the planet for just over 200,000 years, although their hairy ancestors had roamed around for six million. The planet was 4.5 billion years old. If the world were compared to a 24-hour clock, man would have arrived one minute before the start of the next day only to last just over 60 seconds. Even the dinosaurs with their vast bodies and tiny brains had hung around for half an hour.

It was an odd testimony to our ancestors that the monuments of the past endured more effectively than the inventions of the 'new age.' In the bleak wastes that bordered the River Nile, three hulking masses still rose from the sand, although dense new growth choked the temples of old Mexico and what was once South East Asia.

There were tropical lagoons today at the site of the metropolis that was once New York City. In the last death throes of man, all that could be burned was set ablaze to warm and provide food for rudimentary societies, In the oxygen depleted climate, the grandest of plants could no longer grow and only the stingiest of weeds and most hardy of parasites prospered. It was a world made mostly of carbon and angry storms invaded its surface, and the seas rose to swallow much of the land. When the last man suffocated as he climbed an Alpine peak in search of fresher air, the world sighed and quickly began to replenish itself.

It was as if the aberration of man had never existed. Free of maintenance, the great skyscrapers of New York City came crashing down in a matter of decades. Had he been alive in 2145, William Van Alen, the architect of the Chrysler Building, may have been amused to see one of the giant metal radiator caps that adorned a high ledge, forming a nest for a family of exotically plumed parrots. A few years earlier, a giant hurricane had ripped the top off of the Empire State building, ensuring its rival was the tallest building in the city for a while. One World Trade Center has been toppled over a decade earlier. Central Park was now a squawking tropical lagoon full of all manner of reptiles and birds.

Nature had not toppled many of the smaller buildings, but it had grown over them and clinging branches had pulled at their sides until New York was little more than a city of rubble under plants. The meticulously planned systems that had made the city run would have been a distant memory if anybody had been there to remember them. New York in the year 2500 was a gigantic food chain and no one species occupied the high places.

X is for X Camp

Freddie had given up thinking about X Camp months ago. He was told it was better than Y Camp where a fire had broken out in one of the concrete blocks and wiped out half of the inmates, but that was as far as it went.

Every morning at 6 a.m. Freddie was woken up by the sirens and ushered to the mess room where he sat for hours on a hard wooden bench and watched the parade as President Jeb Jackson surveyed his military forces below him. Freddie had no idea how recent the footage was or whether any of the elements of government even existed anymore. All he felt was the burning from the hot soup and its thinness as he looked into its depths in vain for any substance.

Life in the camps was a bit like that. There was no point to the overlong days. Freddie felt he had less purpose than battery hens whose role was to lay eggs until the expiration of their sad lives. In the camps even the people who held them appeared to have little purpose. When there was such a thing as society, prisons served a role in keeping the bad guys away from the responsible members of society. Today the bad guys seemed to be the only ones that thrived and they didn't thrive for very long. The responsible people were all in camps.

In X Camp, Freddie had the occasional vivid dream but he usually dreamed in monochrome. Now and again, there would be an exception - his parents waving goodbye at the end of a dirt track with the skies laced with the heavy purple of the storm, the red of Diana's mouth as they kissed and the day she painted her nails every shade of the rainbow.

The only person Freddie encountered in the week who had a sense of purpose was Commander Krall, the senior official at the camp, who would preach to the masses every Friday. Freddie would be ushered into a large hall and made to stand with the other men. The women were segregated in another compound behind the stage. Krall would deliver a long oratory about how a new world order was underway and they represented the brave future of the republic. Freddie would look at the bedraggled men then as they stared at their feet, at the pale windows and in any direction other than Krall's. It was a hollow charade. The commander was either going through the motions or out of his mind.

When the winter came large swathes of snow settled between the holding blocks and on the skirts of the smoke stacks. The cold was more pronounced than in the past and men shivered and passed away before him. Many were removed to the hospital block. Nobody ever returned.

They moved him to a ground floor cell whose occupant had departed to the hospital. For the first time he was able to see the female residents walking around in a vast parade ground below him.

Freddie had lost his interest in details but one woman caught his attention. There was something familiar about the way she moved, an impulsiveness about her that bordered on anger and could not be tamed even in this place. He noticed her swarthy features under her mane of black hair caught by the wind. Suddenly color flooded into his cell. He thought of the ripples of sunlight through stained glass, the currents that moved warm under the skin.

He looked again. It was Diana. There could be no mistake, although she had lost much of her sturdiness. When he looked again she had a ball in her hand. She threw it in an arc and another figure caught it, a small girl who ran toward her. Freddie felt breathless now. He hadn't seen Melissa since the terrible day in the forest but there could be no doubt that it was the child. His mouth moved at the corners in an unfamiliar way. His coughing morphed into a laugh. He raised himself up to the bars and gave out a shrill shout: "Diana."

For a few seconds the woman held the ball and looked up into the sky full of snow flurries. He fancied she saw a look of recognition as she stared at the sky. Then she threw the ball to the child again in a long curving arc.

W is for Washington

When  Estavez Estralla finally saw the Cascades in the distance, he felt that odd sense of triumph mixed with disappointment. Washington State had assumed a life of its own as a promised land for so long, that his heart was weighed down with the certainty that the paradise would be lost.

He had travelled alone for many weeks. The faces of his wife and children and that parting image of them walking into the teeth of the tornado haunted him at night and fist thing in the morning. He tried to keep it at bay during the day by shouting at his feet. He was unrecognizable as the bright, young engineer of Mexico City. Very few people were recognizable as themselves these days.

In Oregon, he had come close to starvation. He had found a village before his legs gave way. For a few days, he had rested up with a widow before heading again into the wilderness. At Crater Lake, he viewed the top of a mountain pushing up from the waters where it had been blasted by a volcano. Today another disaster was going on as all the trees were pulled down and burned on the sides of the mountains. Crater Lake remained vast and impervious to the current troubles, dwarfing those who navigated its rim.

In Washington, Estralla found new lakes that had swallowed up great swathes of the land. The local people told him of the melting of the glaciers up in the Cascades and the night a town was swallowed up in the waters. The sounds of the inhabitants meeting a watery death haunted the hills around.

After trekking for two days, Estralla came across the Mexican camp he was searching for. Forbidding walls of wood, topped with spikes rose from the ground. There were watch towers, wire and men with guns. Within the huts were flimsy but at least the temperatures were cooler.

"We built the palisade after we were attacked under cover of nightfall," said Manuel, one of the members of the camp's council. "It was local people and feds and they wanted to drive the Mexicans out of the state." He played a guitar and sang mournful songs about the Nevado de Toluca, the mountains of his youth. 

"Did many people die?" asked Estralla.

Manuel just shrugged. "They die. It's normal now. Dying is the new living."

"You sound so matter-of-fact."

"Look around my friend. The lakes are swallowing up the land. The trees are going. The people are swallowing up each other. Literally, my friend - they are talking about cannibalism further west."

"So what can we do?"

Manuel paused strumming for a while and pointed up to the evening sky. Already the impressions of stars and the other planets were appearing in the dense atmosphere.

"Well, maybe you can get me up there. There must be another place where everything is plentiful, and people still know how to smile."

Estralla was suddenly overcome with the long road behind him. He wanted to sink into the ground and float off into the sky. He felt his features crack and the smile of an idiot appear on his face.

"See you can do it too my friend. Those facial muscles must hurt. Give in and stop fighting. I think I know just the song."

V is for Violence

For a few weeks, Freddie and Diana lost themselves. There was the sun that fell in long lines across their bodies, the sound of the birds out the opened windows, the supply of potatoes and herbs and the fires that they cooked over on the grassy area behind the cottage that overlooked the hills.

But there was always a sadness in their lovemaking, They felt like the last lighthouse keepers in the world when the lights had been snuffed out around them and the ships had been moored forever. Diana talked about Melissa, about wanting to go back to the forest to find her. Freddie said they would be captured again and sent to the front if they returned. The war had moved on from Beckley but when they walked into a nearby forest they caught a glimpse of the blackened city from afar. Sometimes the sound of guns beyond the escarpment would remind them that the battle went on.

The outside world occasionally intruded in other ways when wild-eyed men appeared in the lane outside the cottage and they warded them off with their guns and some scraps from an old meal.

When the crack appeared in paradise it was on a peerless blue day that reminded Freddie of the first days he came to the cottage. They were lying in bed when they heard a hard slam as if someone was trying to beat the door open. It was followed by a silence that was more eerie.

"Is the window open?" Freddie whispered to Diana.

She nodded.

Freddie crept out of the bedroom into the darkness of the hall. The door was still shut hard. He moved into the sun room and a blinding light seared him. He moved back from a sharp blow to the temples and was knocked to the floor. A heavy and muddied boot was on his neck. He saw the light slid down the barrel of a gun and saw a man with a heavy red beard towering over him.

The man spat and Freddie recognized the gesture from another time.

"Where is she?"

He saw now the long scars down Carson's arm but was alarmed to see how robust he seemed to be.

"I thought you were dead," he said involuntarily.

"Then who would be around to punish you and that slut? And where's my daughter."

Freddie could only moan under the boot that was crushing his windpipe and point back to the road.

"What have you done with her?" Carson said, his voice low and metallic like a grater.

Freddie didn't know if he meant Diana or Melissa and couldn't speak anyway.

Carson finally kicked him across the floor and left in search of Diana. Freddie heard shouting and a struggle and Carson was back in the room holding Diana's arms behind her neck with the shotgun pointed at her head.

"I should execute you now, but that's too easy and painless. Get up slowly and get out to my truck."

Carson kicked and punched at them as he pushed them down the hall. They were suddenly outside and the blueness was upon them. Freddie's head was ringing and he wanted to throw up.

They formed a ragged triangle outside the car. Freddie looked at Diana and the message she was giving him from her narrowed eyes. To get in the car was almost certain death.

"Get inside," yelled Carson.

Freddie moved a step towards him. "Look Carson. I know we may have got off on the wrong foot but there no need to be enemies. We have food. You look like you need it."

As he said it, Freddie felt the stupidity of his padded words. They were words from another world that weren't suited to this one. Carson had a pronounced limp and was riddled with scars but he had the look of a survivor. Freddie imagined a cave somewhere, a terrible hole where he did nameless things to his victims.

Carson was humming quietly. None of Freddie's words seemed to register. Then there was a sharp movement was Diana broke away. Freddie knew she was heading for the shed where some more guns were stored.

Carson grunted and let a couple of shots loose. Diana crumpled to the floor.

"Oh God," said Freddie.

Carson continued humming. Freddie saw Diana sit up, clutching her foot. He wanted to go over to her but knew he'd be gunned down.

Carson pushed him hard against the car. "Maybe I just need to deal with you now. I can take her with me."

He raised the gun. A shot rang out hard and angry in Freddie's ear. Then to his amazement, he saw Carson lying in the dirt, blood gushing from his chest. Freddie thought the rifle had misfired. Then he saw them. Two men in combat gear were standing in the drive. He saw the Humvee and the old insignia from a bygone time. In the days when there was a nation they used to be Feds.

U is for Utopia

OK, I fell off the A to Z bandwagon. I had a good excuse, namely that of flying to Britain for a long weekend. I thought I could squeeze a few posts out late at night but I hadn't reckoned on my father's computer which needs a handle to crank it up and makes a whirring noise. Now I feel jetlagged and off the pace of my challenge narrative. U was maybe Monday. I'm going under...

Freddie felt the warmth of the sunshine. It embraced him through the strange oval, stained glass window that his father had built so many years ago. He had fallen hard and fast, he was being held deep in the embrace of the chaise longue. He recalled the old railroad now and the time he had joined Martin Bowls as they walked in front of the ornamental steam train and dived into the bushes, laughing hysterically as it almost ran them down. The strange and hypnotic translucence of those days washed through his dreams, like the tides on the big river in the gorge where they used to fish. The summer afternoons in West Virginia had been languid and endless. When his parents took him back from the holiday home it felt like a dream had been shattered.

And here now, with the world shattering around him, he was back at the holiday home and feeling whole. He had limped through fields of wounded men and heard the anger of the guns rumble on the hillsides where he played as a child. He had been amazed when  he had found the cottage, forgotten and unscathed down its antique lane. Glass panes had fallen in on the greenhouse when the storm had passed through, but the vegetables had continued to grow, riotous and defiant. There was no sign of disturbance or that that cottage had been pulled down as the world had disintegrated around it.

The electricity no longer worked but Freddie had lit candles. And he had collapsed into a long and fitful sleep, only to wake to the embrace of the morning sun.

Just when he was starting to believe all that had happened was a terrible dream, he heard a squealing as a nearby window was raised and the sound of a thud as if someone had thrown themselves in. He pulled himself from the couch but he was still heavy with sleep. He caught a glimpse of dark eyes, a wild mane of hair and hands were upon him. He moved back in fear of the mad creature that seemed to be assailing him. The focus returned and he made out the swarthy features of Diana. She was smeared with blood and mud and her blouse was ripped. He did not want to imagine what she had faced on the road.

"Freddie. Get me out of these," she cried. She was ripping and tearing up her clothes and the sun that slanted through the blues and greens of the stained glass, lit up her naked form like a water nymph on the bed of the pond. She grabbed his hands and pulled them roughly onto her naked form to cup and embrace. As they sunk into the chaise longue, Freddie said a silent prayer that time would stand still and preserve them in the morning sunlight, like ancient insects embedded in amber.

T is for Tornado

Estavez Estralla remembered Navajo Joe fondly. He was the only one who appeared to care about his family. After their dangerous trek through Arizona, each subsequent guide seemed more ambivalent.

Jake made it clear he had seen enough Mexicans. “Look I’ve been doing this for two months. I’ve got people to the north east but I seen a lotta them die. Once you get to the north west, it’s just another form of death.”

Then one night as they huddled from a helicopter that had flown over the fly-blown town he told them they needed to go a long way east to go west.

“There is nothing east,” Estralla told him.

“Yew finally getting it,” Jake responded. “They don’t expect anyone to come from the dead lands. We head to Kansas and Wyoming and strike west. The way north is blocked.”

For days they jolted around dirt tracks in Jake’s jalopy, living close to the breadline. In Kansas they saw the crops that once formed the bread basket of America, scorched and dead under the relentless sun. Only then did the scale of the tragedy hit Estralla. If America could no longer feed itself who could? They bunked in the remains of houses and cowered in a cellar when a dust storm headed their way. Their diet made them break out in boils and hives but still the dirt road stretched ahead of them.

Estralla knew the breakdown was not far away. Maria was unrecognizable from the woman who had persuaded him to buy heels in Mexico City three years earlier that had cost him $900. It was perverse now to remember his anger and how he would gladly exchange the passive shadow of a woman before him for the firebrand of the past.

One night in remains of a once grand ranch house after eating a pale gruel, they approached him after Jake had retreated into a Bourbon-assisted sleep.

She was sitting on the floor, flanked by Emmanuel and Calista. Estralla’s daughter had been coughing now for days. The sound froze him inside.

“Esta,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “This trip is becoming a nightmare. We are not living. It’s as if we are ….” And she struggled to find the words. “Corpses.”

“We are like the Living Dead from that old film. We exist but we cannot go on much longer.”

Estralla lit a cigarette and dragged hard. “You know Maria, there are few words I can use to comfort you. We are going forward because there is no way back but we don’t yet know if there is any way forward.”

“Have you seen your son’s ribs sticking out from his skin, Esta? I don’t trust this man Jake. I just don’t know.”

The conversation petered out. Estralla didn’t know if it was better or worse than the silence. None of the alternatives were good ones anymore.

The wind got up in the night. Estralla dreamed of arriving on the North West and finding it peopled by demons and cannibals. The howling got to him. Even when the dream moved on, the howling was going on in his head. When he woke he heard something clatter upstairs. There was a moaning and a howling that was horrible to experience. He pushed open the old hardwood door and sat on what was once a grand porch. Across the blasted fields he saw the up against the dawn sky. Three funnel clouds were moving slowly across the edge of the field by the road. They pulled from the sky, drawing down the blackness, devouring it and roaring on. Under their sharp teeth the remains of trees and debris and an outbuilding, were pulled up and ripped apart. Now they veered toward the house to move away east.

Estralla moved indoors and shouted for his family. There was no response, although he heard a mutter from upstairs from Jake. He moved outside to look again at the manic dance of the twisters at the edge of the field. Then he saw something that stopped his thoughts, heavy like the thud of a tombstone. In the center of the field, he saw a figure hunched but sprinting. Two smaller figures were joined to her hands. They were beating a path through the dead stubble toward the funnel clouds. Estralla was off the porch and moving after them. He looked again and they were gone into the darkening vortex as if they were an apparition.