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There is a high-rise overlooking a mostly barren space of
metropolis. The sky is bright white with touches of distant blue and a few,
far-off cumulus clouds that are full and heavy with touches of grey at the
edges.
The high-rise is all glass window.
I recall my mother.
We stand side by side in one of the condos on the highest
floor of the building. It is a corner space, affording the greatest visibility.
We stand in front of one of the great floor-to-ceiling windows, near the vertex
of the building.
It is bare and minimalistic. Concrete floors. Structural
pillars. Exposed metal ceiling pipes. Unfurnished. Sparse.
We do not speak but silently look out upon the expanse of
space.
In the great distance, high in the sky, tornadoes are
forming and dissipating; forming and dissipating.
Then we are instantaneously juxtaposed; no longer in the
high-rise but on the ground, standing on a vast concrete slab of some urban
wasteland.
In the distance, I see the high-rise.
We stand close together, next to an abandoned train that had
sat upon this urban concrete wasteland for some time.
As I look up, I see five tornadoes approaching, twisting and
turning and circling one another.
I convey, somehow, that we should stand next to the
blackened engine. She listens, this time.
The five tornadoes begin circling the train, star-like in
their form. Impending. Looming. Greater than the skies above. Torrent, yet
ordered.
But we are safe because the electromagnetic force of the
five swirling tornadoes provides a center of calm and safety, or so it seems.
We stand there, my mother and I. Together.
Safe within the center of the storm. For now.
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