Kent Juniper

I knew about the storm before anyone else.



The budget cuts to the news room, including the weather team, had been brutal. It’s true we were just a small local station, but in a place like this where tornados were a yearly event, it didn’t seem like the brightest idea. I was the last full-time meteorologist on the team, and aside from the unpaid interns, I was the sole source for weather  research and broadcasting for our towns and the surrounding area.



I was like some socially-accepted psychic, predicting the future of our county’s people. And I was always right. Well, at least, privately. You see, you can’t get everything right. That would draw too much attention. Instead, I needed to appear like any other weatherman: accurate, but capable of mistakes like anyone else.



And that night, on camera, I told everyone there would be a storm. Which was true… But what I didn’t tell them, was that the four ingredients for creating tornadoes- namely moisture, instability, lift, and wind sheer- were off the charts. There wouldn’t just be a storm; there would be a disaster. For them, of course. Not for me.



Storms always made for an exciting night for me.



While the wind and thunder raged outside, rumbling the ground and clawing at the vinyl siding of my house, they also covered up the noises that came from inside the house: the screaming, the begging, and the loud thud of her body as it hit the floor after my kitchen knife had stabbed deep into the heart of my latest intern. The rain falling from the cumulonimbus clouds always washed away the blood, my footprints, and even softened the ground in the acre out back so I could dig the grave nice and deep.



I used to drive the bodies out of town and dump them in the lake, but I’d gotten so good at it, I didn’t need to anymore. She would join the half dozen other girls who were dumb enough to come back home with me. And anyone who died in the tornadoes was added to my body count, too.



That’s just it: I think so many steps ahead of everyone, they make it so easy…so hard to resist. I always know what’s coming next.



Or, so I thought.



I didn’t predict the police officers at my door the next morning. When they showed me the gold locket, I was even more puzzled. It had belonged to one of the lake girls. I think her name was Mary, but it had been years, and even her face was blurry in my memory of that night.



The officers came to ask about her, saying they had reopened her case after finding her necklace hanging from a branch of an old dead tree after the storm. I shrugged, explaining that it wasn’t that uncommon for a girl like her to go missing. When you live in a rural place like this, the young, starryeyed teenagers often run away from home in hopes of making it in Los Angeles, New York, or some other overrated shit show of a city. I joked with the officers about no one wanting to be an unpaid intern, but I also expressed my condolences and told them I would reach out if I thought of anything that might help.



As soon as their car was out of sight, I sprinted to my laptop and pulled up the radar and weather tracking software to replay what happened the night before. How the hell could that have gotten there from the bottom of a lake miles away?



Then, I spotted it: a tornado. But not just a tornado…a waterspout. Every so often, a waterspout from a powerful storm can suck up things from large bodies of water, including from lakes. It leads to an apocalyptic-like phenomenon often called “fish rain” where it will actually rain down the contents it sucked up from the water, animals and all.



And that necklace wasn’t the only thing from that lake they found that morning. The news reports said they found bones, clothing, hair, and more items that belonged to a dozen different women. They claimed to be investigating it, but I haven’t received any more police visits. I may not have predicted the waterspout, but I did predict their cluelessness. And as always, I was right.



That storm was months ago, and it’s been calm in the skies since. But I predict there will be another storm here, very, very soon. Stay tuned.