Tornadoes, Grief, and Poutine

TORNADOES, GRIEF, AND POUTINE 

by Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga

Content warnings: themes of death and grief

“Let’s make this a clean race, shall we?” My uncle blows a mosquito off his wrist and a watch materializes in its place. “On your marks…”

I crouch on my knees and grin at my senge, teeth chattering even though this isn’t the first time. “If I win, I get to quit track.”

Her tornado tears up a bit of sod near the entrance of Southwest Regional Library. The building’s pink facade looks dusty against her spinning. I look for a face inside the vortex, for a sign that my paternal aunt still lives.

“Get set...”

I raise my heels. My uncle shakes out his sleeves. His neon yellow work shirt changes to sunbeam silk as I watch. His dirt-stained pants become tight denim. He takes off his damp tent of a hat and glances at each of us through gold-tipped sunglasses. Gone is the landscaper of median strips, except for his boots. I look ahead. If only he’d completed his Master’s.

“Go!”

•••

I don’t remember the first time I met my senge. I remember the last.

She lay in a hospital bed we had set up in our dining room. I was eight. My uncle crouched to the floor and used my sleeve as a tissue. I remember thinking he should use his own sleeve.

“Ngwino,” she suddenly beckoned. My uncle shot to his feet, but she waved him away and gestured to me. My uncle had to lift me so she could pull my ear to her mouth. She whispered fiercely in a language I couldn’t understand.

“Quoi?” I asked.

Grumbling, she commanded my uncle. “Sobanura.”

He set me down and told me to listen close. “Your aunt says, you like running, so you’ll run. Faster than anyone. You’ll keep running for the rest of your life.”

I frowned. “But I don’t like running.”

She spit out her words like a motorcycle starting up, her face scrunching in a fierce scowl. My uncle blurted, “It’s the least you can do for being the death of me.” He held his mouth, too late to stop the words from reaching my ears. I remember my mom entering the room at that exact moment and shooing us out. I could hear her scolding my uncle from my bedroom upstairs. She was the only one who understood I had just been cursed.

•••

I shoot across the street, my steps echoing across the intersection. No one’s out because of the severe tornado warning and, well, the actual tornado. My senge won’t follow for now. She agreed to give me a 20-minute head start.

“De toute façon, she’ll win,” my uncle said.

Attends que je te montre, I think. These are the legs that won a state championship in sophomore year. Twice scouts have come to watch me practice. If I cared about running, that would have been an exciting prospect, but I just want to quit.

The one and only time I mentioned the word curse, my friend Katie nodded, then refused to speak to me for a week. It wasn’t long before I realized she took the entire team with her. Katie was my closest friend then. And she was second best on the team, too.

My coach pulled me aside. “The sport doesn’t need people like you, Vi,” she said. Worse than a slap, a door to the face. “Your peers need someone to believe in, not someone with excuses.”

So I was bringing down morale, and no one wanted to back me on my quest to quit. I’d just wanted support, but my senge had taken even that.

All of that mess will end now. Once I win this race, I’ll quit and leave all of it behind. All I need to do is reach the ocean before that tornado does. What’s usually a 30- to 45-minute drive takes 7 hours walking. I have the speed and endurance to half that. It’s what I’ve trained for.

•••

I didn’t mind running at first. It burned away my thoughts. It burned away my heartbeat, until there was only breath, step, and nothing else.

Come middle school, I wanted to try something new. All my friends from track were going into art or cheerleading.

“Come to tryouts with us, Vi!”

“You can’t run forever, Vi.”

One thing about track: hesitate and you’re left behind. I felt it in the turned heads chatting excitedly about trying for the dance team. Running was getting old.

My uncle had finally moved out of the apartment he’d shared with my senge, three years after the fact. His new one-bedroom managed to feel sadder. Thinking of my senge was getting old too. 

The day after I missed track tryouts, there was a severe tornado warning—which was odd in the middle of hurricane season—and schools were shut down. I was chilling in my bedroom when the doorbell rang. I heard hushed voices. My mom called me down the stairs.

“You missed tryouts?” she snapped.

I sighed. “I don’t like running, Maman.”

“Your senge cursed you. You must run!”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “It’s not like she’ll kill me.”

“You’re right. But she will race you.” My uncle stood at the door, work boots dusty and hat askew, wind blowing its flaps up and down. “You promised to run, Vi. You’re lucky your senge is generous. If you beat her in a race, she’ll allow you to stop running.”

“Tantine is here?” I peeked through the door, looking for my senge, but no one waited behind my uncle. My throat felt sticky. Who said I promised her I’d keep running? Weren’t they forcing me?

“She’s not here in the physical sense,” my uncle explained, “but if you come with me—”

“You’re lying! Tantine’s gone.” I snapped. “If you’re so desperate to see someone run, why don’t you race her yourself? I’m done with running.”

A howl tore through the sky, unlike any hurricane wind. It made me think of a wounded animal or a hungry beast. I couldn’t decide which. It came with a strong wind that knocked my uncle backwards. His hat went flying. A beanie materialized to replace it. A palm frond swept behind him, sucked away by an unseen maelstrom. Several car alarms blared. Glass shattered. I found myself clutching my uncle’s sleeve, fingers shaking. I couldn’t lose him, too. 

“That was your senge,” he said. “We can’t keep her waiting.”

•••

My legs pump in a steady rhythm to the beat of someone’s reggaeton playlist. I pass by a house with no hurricane shutters, flashing flamingo pink under a flat roof. I wonder how it will last through a tornado. Other houses flash by in colors more vibrant than they seem when my dad drives past them. Sandy yellows are now rich gold. Bleached blues are aquamarine. There are colors I haven’t seen here before: palm leaf green, coconut white, trick car purple. I almost slow down to check if my eyes aren’t playing tricks on me. The colors of the houses leave a feathery trail, reminding me of the imparambwe in the story of Maguru ya Sarwaya. 

The mythical beasts are faster than cheetahs, my senge said. Faster than the wind. The sky growls as if the street is alive with them.

This isn’t the Sheridan Street I know.

On the other side of the road, the Everglades peeks through the developed concrete in small stretches. I can picture Maguru ya Sarwaya hiding in the grass, waiting to cut the feather tail off an imparambwe.

The stink of saltwater hangs in the air like a continuous fart. I gulp it in, willing it to mean I’m that much closer to the ocean.

Then a shadow lands with a shrieking crunch before me: a hurricane shutter. Wind whips grit at my back. Palm trees sway. A leaf slaps my cheeks. My senge swirls lazily over the swampland to my left, flinging leaves at me. I see thin grass blades mixed in and dodge in earnest. Sawgrass at several miles an hour is no mere papercut.

One nicks my cheek. I suck my teeth. My senge and her obsession with Maguru ya Sarwaya. If there wasn’t that annoying story about a hunter that outruns the wind, maybe the terms of my senge’s curse would’ve been fairer. A race between the two of us maybe, rather than with a monstrous tornado.

Continued in Augur Magazine Issue 5.2...