The next time the plane landed he didn't run out to meet her like he used to. They still drove back to the house and made love but when they were finished his eyes focused out the window at the empty sky, the rusted car in her backyard and some squirrel that would only run off a few minutes later. The monthly bills she threw out the window whipped up into a circle and he said, "They chase each other around and around like a game of Ring around the Rosie. It was something believed was fun when you were a kid, but if you listen carefully to the song, it's about a lot of people dying."
"I'd heard it had nothing to do with that," Sarah said.
He came every few weeks, and blew into Sarah's life. The moment he left, her head was as disheveled as her small apartment; overturned and foreign to the controlled way she kept it. Even though he said he loved her, Sarah could never be a storm chaser because it felt too much like a game, a dangerous one at that. She couldn't bring herself to wrap the idea of him, no matter how much she wanted to, around herself. She'd rather hang in her basement with her arms tightly clutched over a bent down neck.
It had always been like that. When she was a girl, she pitched penny into a well. When her father asked her what she wished for, she told him, "Another penny, so I could buy a piece of Bazooka." He frowned, said, "You should have wished for a dime then." Nothing was good enough.
Then, during the summer she spent in Missouri as a teenager with her mother, a tornado blew through. She wished it would dance across the field and lift the motel off the ground and take her far way to a new place; a new life. She wanted that badly, but it didn't happen so Sarah ran out in the aftermath of the storm and dropped to her knees, the wind still strong enough for her to feel a fine coating of dust spraying onto her face.
Now the sky was turning a dark and sickly green when the taxi honked for him. He pulled up the suitcase up by the handles and later when the wind started to rise, Sarah realized how quickly things are destroyed.