Текст книги "Torn Away"

Автор книги: Jennifer Brown

Соавторы: Jennifer Brown
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CHAPTER
THREE

“Mom? Mom!” I kept yelling into the phone, even though I knew the connection had been lost. I tried to call again, but the line wouldn’t connect. I realized that my hands were shaking, and my fingers didn’t want to work around the phone’s keypad anymore. I dropped it twice and then tried to call Ronnie, but that call wouldn’t go through, either.

The sirens screeched one last time and then abruptly stopped, and I could hear wild clicking against the window—hail—and something else. Something louder. Thumps and thuds and scrapes against the house, like larger items were slamming up against it. Metallic clangs and broken sounds.

For a moment I sat there, frozen on the couch. I thought I heard what sounded like a train rumbling down our street, and I remembered one time in fourth grade when our teacher read us a book that described the sound of a tornado as being something like the sound of a locomotive. I hadn’t believed it at the time—it didn’t make sense that a tornado could sound like anything but blowing wind. But there it was, the sound of a train passing. I held my breath in frightened anticipation.

The moment stretched around me—the noise getting louder and then muting as my ears began popping—and I gripped my cell phone like I was holding on to the side of a cliff. I tried to be still so I could listen. Maybe I was mistaken. Maybe it was my imagination and there was no train sound out there. I was hearing what I was scared to hear.

But then something really huge hit the house. I heard the tinkling of glass breaking upstairs, on the other end of the house, over where Marin’s bedroom was. A loud metallic grating noise seared the air outside as something was pushed down the street. I only had seconds to think about Kolby, to wonder if he was still out there, when the basement window suddenly shattered, ushering in an enormous roar of noise.

I screamed, my voice getting lost in the din. I instinctively covered my head and then scrambled under the pool table, pulling my backpack and cell phone with me.

Noise blasted in and I rolled up in a ball, cradling my head with my arms. I squeezed my eyes shut. There were great, loud creaks and bangs. Glass shattering and shattering and shattering. Thunks as things spun and flew and hit walls. Groans and wooden popping sounds as walls gave, bricks tumbled. Crunching thuds as heavy building materials hit the floors.

I heard these things happening, but it was unclear where exactly they were happening. Was it in the basement? Upstairs? Down the street? Space and time were distorted, and even the most basic things like direction didn’t make sense.

Wind whipped the hem of my shirt and pulled at my hair, and I felt out in the open, as if the tornado had somehow gotten into the basement.

Small items blasted across the floor and battered me. I opened my eyes and saw one of Ronnie’s work boots thud against my side. Papers whipped around me, bending over my arms. A wall calendar screamed past. An empty milk crate, which had spilled its contents, tumbled up against my shins. An ashtray knocked me in the back of the head, making me cry out and inch my fingers over to where it had hit, feeling the warmth and wetness I was sure was blood. The pool table spun half a circle and came to rest again.

It felt like a never-ending stream of chaos. Like my whole world was being shaken and tossed and torn apart, and like it would never stop. Like I would be stuck in this terror forever.

I was confused, and my arms, legs, back, and head stung. I coiled into myself, gripping my head and crying and crying, half-sobbing, half-shrieking. I don’t know how long I stayed that way before I realized it was over.

CHAPTER
FOUR

When I opened my eyes, at first I stayed in my safety position. I could hear rain now, pelting the ground, only the ground seemed very close. It was still dark, still windy, but had already lightened up some since the tornado had passed.

At last, I forced myself to let go of my head and felt around for my cell phone. It was lodged between my backpack and my stomach and I pulled it out, my fingers white and shaky as I clung to it. I tried to call Mom.

No connection.

I tried Ronnie.

Same.

911.

Nothing.

I tried Jane. Dani. Everyone I could think of.

I was getting no bars. No cell service.

I lay there for a few more minutes, trying to catch my breath and quell my panicked sobbing. My arms and legs felt tingly from adrenaline and fear. I listened. I could hear talking and loud cries and car alarms bleating. A stuck police siren. A plea for help. And off in the distance, just maybe, the growling chug of the funnel cloud moving on.

Growing up, we were taught over and over again what steps to take in case of an approaching tornado. Listen for sirens, go to your basement or cellar, or a closet in the center of your house, duck and cover, wait it out. We had drills twice a year, every year, in school. We talked about it in class. We talked about it at home. The newscasters reminded us. We went to the basement. We practiced, practiced, practiced.

But we’d never—not once—discussed what to do after.

I think we never thought there would be an after like this one.

It seemed like forever before the rain and wind stopped. It was still gray around me, but the sky had lightened up enough that I could see fine without the flashlight, which I’d dropped in my scramble to the pool table.

Kolby. I would go get Kolby. See if he could call my mom from his phone. Slowly, I uncurled myself and, after a moment of hesitation, slid out from under the table and sat up.

At the opposite end of the basement, where Ronnie’s workbench normally sat, there was no ceiling. The floor I had been standing on while rummaging for a flashlight just fifteen minutes before was now buried in a dusty pile of rubble—what used to be our kitchen, except the table was gone and the walls were gone and the plates had all fallen out of their cabinets, which were also gone, and now lay in a heap on the concrete basement floor.

What was worse—I could see sky where the kitchen used to be. Wires and broken pipes jutted out here and there. Water gushed from somewhere.

“Oh my God,” I said, pulling myself up to standing, unsure whether my wobbly legs would keep me that way. “Oh my God.”

I took a few steps toward the rubble. The closer I got, the more sky I could see. The kitchen walls, they were gone. Completely and totally gone.

I could have walked right up the rubble pile to the outside if I’d wanted to, but the sight of my broken kitchen was so foreign, the bare and jutting wires so frightening, I couldn’t make myself approach it. The basement stairs were still standing, and for some reason walking up them and through the basement door into the house seemed like the right thing to do, so I made my way over to them, a part of me hoping that maybe if I went up the stairs, the rest of the house wouldn’t be as bad as the kitchen looked.

The couch had been pulled to the rubble and turned up on its side. There were clothes strewn everywhere.

I glanced down at my hands, my fingers streaked with dried blood, my right hand wrapped around my useless cell phone. I stuffed the phone into my pocket and reached around to the back of my head again. It was sticky and my hair felt kind of matted, but it didn’t really hurt or anything, and it wasn’t gushing blood, so I ignored it, trying to keep things in perspective. It was just a cut. It could wait until Mom got home. Everything would be fine once she got here.

I crept forward, edging around things that didn’t belong there. A hunk of Venetian blinds. A DVD. A carpet of wet papers. A dog leash. A swing from Kolby’s little sister’s swing set, the ends of the chain twisted and broken, as if chewed up by a giant monster.

Slowly I crept up the stairs and pushed on the door, which would only open a little before it was stopped by something wedged against it. I tried leaning into the door and pushing harder, but it wouldn’t budge, so I sucked in my stomach and squeezed through the opening.

I stepped into the room, my dried-bloody hand flying up to my mouth. Had I not known I was standing in my living room, I never would have guessed this was my house. The roof was completely missing. The whole thing. No holes or tears—gone. Some of the outside walls were also missing, and the remaining walls were in perilously bad condition. One was leaning outward, the window blown and the frame hanging by a corner. Farther away, where the living room and the kitchen normally met, the house just… ended. I knew, from what I’d seen downstairs, that much of it had toppled in on itself. But I hadn’t been prepared for how gone it was. Even the stove was missing. Not moved, but completely absent. Nowhere in sight.

I couldn’t make it to my room. I couldn’t even really tell where my room was. And for a few minutes I stood dumbly in the basement doorway, my hand over my mouth, my eyes wide, my heart beating so fast I thought I might throw up, trying to take everything in. I’d seen photos of houses destroyed by tornadoes before, but never had I seen anything like it in real life. The destruction was complete, and terrible.

Outside. I needed to go outside and see if anyone else’s house had gotten hit. I needed to find help. To find Mom. To find someone who could take me to her, so I could break it to her how bad the house was damaged, and let her know I was okay.

I made my way to the front door, which was, oddly, still there, still on its hinges, though it was hanging on to a partial wall.

It took me several minutes of clawing at scraps of wood and climbing over debris to get to the door, treading carefully in my bare feet, wishing I’d been wearing shoes when the tornado hit, or at least had brought a pair down to the basement with me. I cut my hand on glass twice, more blood seeping out and mixing with the dried blood and grime already there. I wiped it on my jeans and kept going, trying to force down the frantic feeling welling inside me as I heard more crying and voices outside.

As I took a final step toward the door, my foot sank into something soft and cold. It was Marin’s purse, the one Mom had made her leave at home. I pulled it out of the rubble, then held it up and studied it. Other than being dirty and dusty and a little bit wet, it looked fine. I set it on top of a bent kitchen chair next to me for safekeeping—Marin would want her purse when she got back.

Finally, I wrenched the door open and immediately went breathless, as if I’d had the wind knocked out of me. I saw little lights dance before my eyes, and my lips felt tingly. For a shaky moment I thought I might pass out.

It hadn’t been just our house.

It had been everyone’s houses.

There was no street. Just piles upon piles of scraps and glass and broken furniture and wood and trash. I leaned back against the remaining wall of my house, but it groaned under my weight and I stood up again, quickly. I couldn’t get my breath.

I wanted my mom. Or Ronnie. Somebody to hold me up.

Several neighbors were standing in the street, in various poses of upset. Mr. Klingbeil stood with his hands on his hips, staring at what used to be his house and shaking his head. Mrs. Fay was locked in an embrace with Mrs. Chamberlain. They were both weeping loudly. Some of the little kids were crouching in the street, their faces looking curious and half-excited as they picked up branches and toys and bricks, but also very somber, like even they understood that this was bad, bad, bad. A couple of people were bent at the waist, mucking through the rubble of their houses, picking up little busted pieces of this and that and discarding them again.

I could see movement where our road normally connected with Church Street. A trickle of people were trudging along, looking shocked and lost. Off in the distance I could hear the wailing of sirens—emergency vehicles—but nothing nearby. How could they get to us, I wondered. There was no street to drive on. It was impossible to find it under all the rubble.

One man fell and a woman near him dropped to his side, pushing on his shoulder and yelling out, “Help! Anyone! Please!” but the people kept walking around them, looking dazed and wounded. Finally, a man stopped and after a few minutes helped her get the fallen man to his feet. Together, they trudged along, the man between them, his arms slung around their necks.

“Holy shit,” I heard. Kolby was pulling himself through his basement window, which appeared to be the only opening to the basement at all. Unlike my house, which still had that one wall standing, Kolby’s house had been completely razed to the ground. “Holy shit!” And then he yelled it. “Holy shit!” His little sister scrambled out the window behind him, silently taking in the scene as I’d done, her feet bare, her legs and feet smudged with dirt.

“You okay, Jersey?” he shouted, and I could feel my head nodding, but I still wasn’t entirely sure I wasn’t going to pass out, so the movement felt very slow and fluid.

He turned and dropped to his knees, sticking his head back through the basement window, and then came out again, holding his mom under her arms and tugging her. She tumbled outside and sat where she landed, her hands going to her cheeks. “Oh, dear Lord,” I heard her say, and then she began praying. “Thank you, Jesus, for keeping us alive. Thank you, dear Jesus, for saving us.”

Kolby started in my direction. “You should get away from that wall,” he said, climbing across boards to get to me. He stepped on a baby rattle, cracking it. I stared at it, wondering where it might have come from and what had happened to the baby it belonged to. “Jersey? Hey, Jersey? You okay?”

I nodded again, but the image of a baby flying through the air, caught in the eye of a monster tornado, was about all I could take, and I felt myself starting to go down.

“Whoa! Whoa!” Kolby said, and he lunged up to the porch to grab my shoulders and keep me upright. “Any help over here?” he called out.

“I’m okay,” I mumbled. “I just need to sit down.”

“You’re bleeding,” he said, maneuvering so he was next to me, his arm around both of my shoulders. He walked me off the porch and toward where our front yard used to be. Kolby and I had played more games of Wiffle ball on that front yard than I could count. Now that seemed like forever ago.

“I’m okay,” I mumbled again, but when Kolby eased me toward a cinder block on the ground, I was glad to be sitting.

“You’re bleeding,” he repeated. “Where are you hurt?”

I reached up to the back of my head again. It seemed dry now. “An ashtray hit me,” I said. “But I think it’s just a cut.”

I heard his mother calling out to someone else, asking if anyone was hurt. Kolby squatted in front of me so that his face was only inches from mine. “Where is everybody?” he asked, and when I didn’t answer, he said, “Your mom and Ronnie? Marin?”

I closed my eyes. It was easier to concentrate when I wasn’t looking at the wasted neighborhood. “Mom and Marin are at dance class. I don’t know where Ronnie is. I don’t know if he was on his way home from work or…” I trailed off, watched as Mr. Fay pointed out to Mrs. Fay a two-by-four that had been driven into the side of their house and was sticking out like a dart. Mrs. Fay snapped a photo of it with her phone. “The whole street is gone.”

He stood up and peered down toward Church Street, with its trickle of refugees heading away from the destruction.

“I know,” he said. “It’s just… holy cow.”

“How far do you think it went?” I asked.

He shook his head but didn’t answer.

“Kolby? How far do you think it went?”

“I don’t know,” he said, his voice sounding flat and croaky. “Looks like far.”

“Do you think…?” I started, but I trailed off, afraid to finish my question, afraid that the answer would be no.

Do you think Mom will be able to get to me?

CHAPTER
FIVE

The next few hours went by in a blur. Some of the men were going house to house, cocking their heads and listening for cries for help under the rubble. Every time they heard even the tiniest noise—the mew of a cat or the wooden click of a board settling or anything that might have sounded like a whimper—they fell on it, down on their knees, ripping things apart with their hands, their faces dripping with sweat and determination. A yell went up every time a hole to a basement was found, an expectant and grateful face peering up out of it.

And then they found Mrs. Dempsey.

Too fragile to make it to her basement, the old lady had cowered in her bathtub to ride out the storm. She’d even brought some pillows in with her. They found her there, pillows still surrounding her but a central air unit crushing the top half of her body.

They pulled the air conditioner off her, and Mrs. Fay found a shower curtain and they draped it over Mrs. Dempsey’s body.

After that, the mood got very somber and people started wondering aloud when the emergency vehicles were going to come help us. We could still hear them braying and warbling in the distance, but the sounds weren’t getting any closer. We thought we even heard the staccato bark of someone talking through a PA system or megaphone, but none of us could make out the words. It was all very muffled and so very far away. Why were they so far away?

The rescue efforts got slower. People started saying they were thirsty, or tired, and spent more time sitting or picking through their own things halfheartedly. I had no doubt that after all that digging, the men were thirsty, but I had a theory that the new focus on preventing dehydration was a way of not admitting that they were really afraid of finding another dead body—only the next time it might be a toddler or a teenager or someone they’d had lunch with just last week.

I stayed on my cinder block, watching them. Every so often I would try my cell phone again. Wait for it to ring, which it never did. Peer down the street for Mom’s car, which never turned the corner. Kolby’s shadow fell over me.

“We’re going for a walk. You wanna come?” he asked, touching me lightly on the shoulder.

I shook my head, not looking up.

He waited a moment. “You sure? We want to see how bad the damage is, and see where everybody’s going.”

I saw his shadow gesture toward Church Street, but again I shook my head.

“Will you be okay by yourself?” he asked, shuffling the toe of his shoe awkwardly against the cinder block I sat on. “I can stay.”

“No,” I said. “Go ahead. I’m fine. It’s just if I’m not here when Mom gets back, she’s gonna freak out.” But even I wasn’t sure how honest that statement was. Part of me knew I was staying because I was afraid to see how far the damage went. I didn’t want to know why a steady stream of people continued to trickle down Church Street.

After he left, I tried not to let my mind wander, tried not to think about the small things I’d lost in the tornado, especially not with Mrs. Dempsey covered by a shower curtain a couple houses down, but I couldn’t help myself. My clothes, my earrings, my music. Granted, I didn’t have trendy clothes or expensive earrings, but if it had all blown away… I had nothing. Even a few cheap somethings is better than nothing.

How much of Mom’s stuff was gone? How much of all of our stuff was gone? And how long would it be before we got it back?

I looked down at my feet and noticed that one was resting on a photo. I picked it up, pulled it out of the grime, and studied it. I wondered where our photos had gone, if our past would end up under a stranger’s foot, would be tossed in the garbage.

The thought left me cold. It seemed impossible to still have a past if your memories were resting beneath blackened banana peels in a landfill.

I stared at that photo for a long, long time. A family, dressed in matching T-shirts and jeans, stood by a tree. The little boy up front mugged for the camera. He was smiling so hard around gaps of missing teeth, his eyes were pushed shut. His mom’s hands were on his shoulders protectively. An older sister with long, straight hair smiled sweetly with her dad’s arm around her waist. A whole, happy family. I wondered if the tornado had hit them, too. If it had done to their house what it had done to ours. I wondered where their street was. Where that tree was.

A jolt went through me and I stood up. The trees.

For the first time, I noticed that they were gone. Not just a few broken or blown over here or there, which happened pretty regularly during spring storms in Elizabeth. They were gone. Big holes where some had been. Snapped-off trunks. Stripped branches. Our once-tree-lined street had been robbed of all things green. I turned in circles, craning my neck to see around and above the mounds of boards and broken houses. I couldn’t see any trees.

I dropped the photo back onto the mountain of junk and plopped down again.

The afternoon stretched on, and then evening began to set in. My stomach started to twist with hunger and I idly thought about the hamburger I’d left in the pan on the stove when the storm hit. I wondered what we’d do for dinner, and the thought prompted me to try my cell phone again. Still no service. Still no Mom.

Kolby and his mom and sister came back, their figures shadowy under the graying sky of evening combined with what looked like another approaching thunderstorm. Slowly, people who’d stayed behind crawled out of the rubble to greet them, dropping whatever bricks or boards or old appliances they were holding, curiosity winning out on their faces. I got up and walked toward them, too.

“Gone,” Kolby was saying when I reached them. He was out of breath, his eyes bright and cheeks gritty. “Gone,” he repeated. He shook his head. His sister clutched the hem of her mom’s shirt.

“We walked at least a mile,” his mom said, her voice loud and take-charge. The emergency sirens had finally stopped, leaving us in a blanket of confused silence. “Everywhere it looks like this. And there’s people…” She paused, her jowls trembling. “Dear Jesus, please be with those people,” she whispered.

“Are the ambulances…?” Mrs. Fay asked, but tapered off when Kolby shook his head.

“No way they can get to us. The streets are covered. Like this one. The houses are gone. And it looks like it goes on forever. I can’t even see Bending Oaks. It’s gone, too. A whole school.”

Bending Oaks was the junior high Kolby and I went to. It was a good three miles away, but it sat atop a hill, so it was visible from almost anywhere in Elizabeth. I had a hard time wrapping my head around what the hill would look like without the big building silhouetted in the sun.

When I tuned in again, Kolby was saying, “… a two-by-four through his leg. He was trying to drag himself out of his house, and his neighbor found a wheelbarrow. But they said the hospital’s been hit, too, so nobody knows where to go. Nobody’s ever seen anything like this.”

I thought back to all the people I’d seen walking along Church Street. About the man who had collapsed. They’d been trying to make their way to help, but what if there was no help? How far would they have to go before they found it?

“Dear Jesus, please be with us in our time of sorrow and need…” Kolby’s mother had begun again, her eyes shut tight, her palms facing upward. Kolby glanced at her, seemed to consider saying more, but thought better of it and hung his head. A couple people gathered around his mom and muttered “Amen” every so often, listening as her prayer tumbled through our devastated portion of the street.

The hospital was at least five miles in the opposite direction. If it had been hit, and Bending Oaks had been hit, that meant this tornado had reached in and swept away a huge chunk of Elizabeth.

It also meant that Marin’s dance studio had been right in the tornado’s path.

Nobody knew what to do. We stood gathered around Kolby and his mom and sister for a long time, and more neighbors joined us, one by one.

Someone’s son had been sucked right out of his bedroom while he rummaged for a weather radio. Someone hadn’t heard from her husband, who was driving home from work. Someone wondered if his wife, a nurse working a rotation in the PICU, was okay. Someone had heard pounding and yells coming from beneath a car and was sure there were still neighbors trapped inside their homes. And speaking of homes… nobody had one anymore. Where would we go? What would we do? That became our mantra: What are we going to do?

Then the sky opened up and raindrops tumbled onto our arms and our cheeks and pattered against the boards we stood on, releasing an earthy smell. And we had no trees to huddle under. We had no umbrellas. Our only shower curtain was covering poor Mrs. Dempsey. So we stood in the rain, squinting against it, our shoulders hunched, for as long as we could, adding to our mantra: It’s raining now, and we have nowhere to go, what are we going to do?

A couple of the men were able to wrench open a car door, and a few people climbed inside. The windows fogged and it was like they were gone. Saved.

And then the wind picked up and began to drive the rain sideways into our ears, and our hair began to drip, and it felt good, but it also felt cold, and we couldn’t help wondering what was next for us, especially after Kolby’s mom began praying, “Dear God, please let there not be another tornado on the way,” and it wasn’t clear if she was actually praying for this or just stating the same fear that had begun to trickle into all of our minds.

Some of the neighbors worked together to prop a piece of wallboard up against the side of what was left of their house, and they huddled under it, their clothes soggy, their feet sinking into the now-saturated debris. Tears began to flow along with the rain as the reality of what had happened to us truly began to sink in.

Kolby’s mom and sister joined them, and soon it was Kolby and me standing in the street alone, blinking at each other through raindrops clinging to our eyelashes.

“There was this guy,” he said, now that it was just the two of us. He blinked off into the distance, took a breath, and turned his gaze back to me. “It was like… like he’d been hit by a bomb. He was in half, Jersey. I didn’t even see where his legs had gone. I think they were buried.”

“Oh my God. What about Tracy?”

“She didn’t see it. Mom kept walking with her. But I can’t stop seeing it, you know? I don’t think I ever will.”

I touched his shoulder lightly, then, embarrassed, pulled my hand away.

“I puked,” he said. “And I feel like such a pussy for puking. It’s…” He shook his head. “Forget it.”

The rain drove into us. I didn’t know what to say to him about the half-man or about his puking. I didn’t know what he wanted from me. Our relationship had always been about playing pickup games of baseball or tag or building forts and riding bikes. We didn’t talk about puking, or crying, or being scared.

And I was. I was so, so scared.

“I’m going inside,” I said, like I’d said to him a million times before. Like I was tired of playing hide-and-seek or wanted to watch TV or eat dinner or something else totally ordinary.

“Inside where?”

I gestured to what was left of my house. “Basement. In case…” In case of another tornado. “In case my mom comes home.”

He shook his head. “You shouldn’t go back in there. It’s not stable. Look how it’s leaning. And the ceiling’s been ripped out.”

“It’ll be okay. It’s better on the inside.” Which was a total lie, but the more the thunder roared above us, the more Kolby’s haunted eyes transferred that image of the half-man into my soul, the more his mom prayed into the wind, the more frightened I became. Please, God, don’t make me have to go through another tornado. Not again. Not alone.

My heart started pounding and I started breathing heavy and I knew I needed to get back into the basement, back to where I’d been safe, right away. “I’ll come out when the rain stops.”

Kolby grabbed my arm and I gently pulled away from him. I smiled. Or at least tried to. It felt like a smile, anyway.

“I’ll be fine, Kolby. You should be with your mom and Tracy right now.”

A bolt of lightning crashed and we both jumped.

“You want me to go with you?” he asked, though I could tell by the way he stared anxiously at the house that he wanted the answer to be no. I could tell he felt torn between protecting me and protecting his mom and sister.

I didn’t want him there. Kolby was a great friend, and a part of me wanted to latch on to him and hope he could keep me safe. But for some reason, the devastation behind that leaning half-wall of my house felt too personal, too embarrassing. It was my family’s life, all bunched up and bundled and twisted into heaps, and I didn’t want him to see it, even though I knew that most of our stuff was probably lying on the street right now, getting turned into mush by the rain, and that most of his stuff was, too.

“It’s okay. I’ll be fine,” I said. “When my mom comes, tell her I’m inside, okay?”

“Okay,” he said reluctantly. “But if you need anything…” He trailed off, probably thinking exactly what I was thinking, which was What? If I need anything, what? What can you do? You lost everything, too.

I nodded and turned back toward my house on shaking legs.

There was more thunder, and my heart pounded as I climbed the steps and slipped in through the front door.

My brain expected to find the scene on the other side of the door exactly like it had always been. Brown carpet, vacuum lines still scratched through it from Monday’s chores. The TV on. The wall of mirrors behind the dining room table—a throwback from when the house was built in the 1970s—reflecting our mismatched garage-sale table and chairs. The white linoleum with the pale blue flowers stretching into the kitchen, the light of the dishwasher blinking to indicate that the dishes inside were clean. The hum of the refrigerator and the air conditioner.

Instead, it was raining. Inside my house. The wet plaster of the fallen walls smelled chalky. The only sound was the rumbling of the sky.

I tried to make out something familiar. And finally I did. The television stand was missing. But the television sat there in its place, as if someone had picked up the TV and taken the stand, then set the TV back down. Of course, what use was a TV when there was no outlet to plug it into?