“Tornado Warning” by Matthew Zanoni Müller (Fiction ’10)

Tornado Warning

The Kramers had one of those old flat black plastic weather radios on their kitchen counter that screeched to life as Catherine and Eric headed for the door. They were house-sitting for the Dean of Eric’s graduate school, who lived just over the border in the Berkshires. The wailing radio siren stopped them before it dropped to the repeated screech screech screech of the static preceding the announcement of the weather report spoken by a man in the windy cluttered signal of an AM radio: “. . . warning, tornado warning issued for Western Massachusetts. . .” The couple wavered in the door, stuck between listening to the report and heading out to the car so they could run into town to get some new sneakers for Eric’s marathon training.