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The Tempest Is Waiting
The storms are just a part of who she is.
Sometimes it starts with a rain shower at the break of dawn.
Other times, when she’s had a nightmare, the storms roll out in waves that she can’t control. Gusts of wind batter the windows, and she knows with a sinking feeling that her neighbors will report downed trees in the morning. Hundreds may lose electricity for days.
But at least she’s not in the middle of nowhere, directing all eyes to a shack of a home where tornadoes lurk like ghosts in a cemetery. When she’s cradled in suburbia, cocooned between small trailers that are indistinguishable from one another, no one can blame the storms on her.
It is in this way that Mona Powers slinks through life, undetected but for the whiff of rainfall that follows her every move.
Long ago, she decided to put her head down and move through the quiet corridors of human consciousness by being barely visible — even unto herself.
Nobody ever notices the full-time cashier at the gas station. This job is safe, and the only conversations she has is with the truck drivers who migrate too much to look twice at someone like her. Maybe they share a laugh, if that, before they pluck up their candy bars, energy drinks, and perhaps a receipt before barreling out the way they came.
