Grandma Electric

"You okay son?", she said.

My granny and I are sitting up together. It’s a cool spring night in Vici, a small Oklahoma town.

There's a stillness before a storm sets in and the front door is open. Through the screen door, I can hear the wind picking up and the “hoots” from Elvis, the barn owl who lives in the thicket of large trees across the road. The local weatherman had interrupted "The Dukes of Hazard", and now he was pointing out the green, yellow, and red areas of the storm map.

"There a storm coming grannie!", I said.

Her wrinkled face glowed out of the darkness with warm amber splendor from a long draw of a pall mall cigarette reflecting from the lens of her eyeglasses.

Exhaling and with devotion, she placed it in the clear square glass ashtray next to the thrift store oilers mug of tepid black coffee she liked to drink from dawn to dusk.

"Looks like it son.", she said.

The kitchen table became an artist table once cornbread and stew had been chowed down. Daubing a tiny brush into the blue cerulean, she applied a slow first stroke to the unpainted ceramic bird. The anticipation of the storm began to grow inside my stomach. The calmed frenzy excited me.

Grannie continued to paint in the impervious womb of black coffee, tiny plastic bottles of acrylic paint, unpainted what-not characters, and pall-mall smoke trills circling her hardened stained fingers.

"Grandma? can I paint one?", I said.

She nodded contently shaking loose a strand of her brown cotton candy thicket that I was always eager to touch.

I reached to pat the strand down.

" Son! Now don't do that!" she said.

"But Grandma! I love your hair!", I said.

"Come on now. Sit down here. You can paint that Donald Duck there.", she said.

I sat down beside her. She placed the Donald Duck what-not in front of me on a piece of newspaper.

"Now here's your glass of water to clean your brush with and you can use this red brush.", she said.

Abruptly, A Dairy Queen commercial came on the television.

"Grandma? Do you think in a little while we could get a 7up and a Mr. Goodbar from the diner?", I said.

My parents had moved to Vici after buying a small diner there. They had grandma working as a cook and a couple of my aunts working as waitresses. It was a tough time for me and my siblings. We had been to several schools in a short period of time since our family home had been destroyed by fire.

This weekend, my parents had gone away with my brother and sister to visit a relative and i had been left in the care of grannie Ruth.

I knew she had the keys to the diner.

"Well. I suppose in a bit we could sneak up there.", she said.

I was more than okay with grannie. I felt that the world was a safe and loving place around her. She was far from perfect, but she was real and true to me. The hair on her upper lip and chin tickled me with each kiss goodnight. I always slept so deeply curled up next to grannie's big behind. A little sun-kissed brown-eyed boy's torpid eyes closing to the cadence of a dancing white curtain acquiescing back and forth in front of the open window. As if to point the way to my own sweet death someday.

I grabbed the bottle of cobalt blue and twisted off the plastic cap. I squirted a speckle onto a white paper plate we had for a palette. I dipped my red brush into the cup and stirred exchanging a smile with grannie Ruth. Her brown eyes were deep and dark like wood and warm chocolate. She and i were content to paint and enjoy refuge from the thunderstorm brewing outside.

All at once the wind wafted and blew the front door back and forth on the hinges hitting the side of the trailer and we both jumped with excitement.

"Lord have mercy!" she said.

Granny stepped down onto the first step and reached for the doorknob of the trailer door. She was almost pulled out of the trailer by the roaring wind. She closed the door. All the excitement in the room went still. Granny's hair was static and displaced as she readjusted her glasses.

"Listen here boy we better get that Mr. Goodbar before it gets any worse outside",

She said.

I smiled at grannie with a big grin and tossed the red brush that I was holding into the plastic cup of muddled water.

I ran to the floor near the edge of the couch where my size 5 keds lay upside down and on top of one another, I put my right foot into the shoe and tied the laces, then I repeated on my left foot with excitement galore. I stood up pulling my Batman pajamas out of the crack of my behind.

"I'm ready grannie", I said.

Grannie put on her day coat still wearing her sandals with her Brown nylon knit pants that she constantly wore. Grannie opened the door as I stepped past the weatherman on the TV pointing to a blotch of red on his meteorological map.

We slammed the door shut behind us and stepped down the first step.

Granny Ruth held my small right hand in her soft spotted wrinkled fingers as we started on the wet gravel towards the diner. I winced against the drizzle of rain patches blowing to and fro as we meandered to the road. Granny was steadfast as I kept pace with her.

"Come on now", she said.

I looked at the sky with childhood amazement as the clouds were like unglued puzzle pieces slicing and dicing each other for a better position in which to stop and say hello. Suddenly, Elvis darted from his home in the large tree. He screeched and circled us once or twice under the electric black canopy of the swirling mad sky making for refuge under the metal roof garage.

“Grannie! Look at Elvis!”, I said.

The blackness of the sky illuminated with a silver lightning strike not too far in the distance.

"Woo! Come on boy!", Granny yelled.

She hurried us along down the road in accordance with the immediate rolling thunder that crackled and hissed loading the barrel for another shot at us.

We reached the corner and hurried to get under the restaurant awning.

"Here son! hold the light steady so I can unlock the door", she said.

My little wet fingers grabbed the old bulky oilman flashlight and shined the dim yellow light at the silver diner door lock. Grannie fumbled through the keychain to find the brown key, with a decisive push into the lock she turned the key clockwise in the rain-soaked yellow chaos coming down.

We hurried inside. The door slammed behind us as if to say enough already. Granny took the flashlight dashing behind the counter.

" Ok. Now, let's see what we have. Three musketeers? KitKat, PayDay...," She said.

" Mr. Goodbar!" I said.

"Ok. We will get a couple of those, and a Payday for me. " , She said.

Granny grabbed the candy bars from underneath the counter glass and stuffed them quickly into her coat pocket.

" And a couple of cokes right?", She asked.

" 7up!"

" Oh 7up sounds good! ", She yelled crossing the diner to the Frigidaire cooler. I scurried beside her to look in the cooler that was lined with ice-cold bottles and cans of Coca Colas, Dr. Peppers, Orange Crushes, and 7ups.

Granny grabbed a Dr.Pepper and 7up and placed them in her other coat pocket.

" Ok. I'm weighted down and loaded for bear.", She laughed.

Suddenly, the wind swooped up and blew the diner sign off it's hinges. Granny and I watched through the front diner windows as It skidded down the block making an unbearable edging sound, hitting a car, then concrete before disappearing entirely.

The velocity of the storm was unreal. It was as if the small town was in destruction mode before our very eyes. Granny and I stood silently watching an invisible monster tear the Main street apart.

Suddenly, a huge siren started to scream. Granny's eyes got very big in the glow of the flashlight. She quickly grabbed my hand.

"That's the tornado warning.", she said.

We moved very briskly through the kitchen toward the back of the diner.

The glass window on the back door blew out. The wind suddenly became excruciatingly loud.

Granny stopped, opened the freezer to our left, and slung me in there.

" Son! Get in here! It's going to be all right! " She said.

The wind and flashing light were burning my eyes. I just wanted to go back home and sleep next to granny. She closed the door. I looked around the freezer. I slid a plastic eggs crate over underneath the freezer door window. Banging on the door I yelled and yelled for granny.

The back door of the diner flew open with a huge gust of thick weirdly colored blueish-green air. Grannie became entranced by the light and wind.

She turned to look at me in the window of the freezer.

" I love you", she said.

And with a big flash of light,

She was gone.

The windy chaos meandered through the diner. Panicked for Grannie Ruth, screaming and hitting the plastic freezer window as old pictures were broken and ripped off the diner walls. A neon sign shattered with shotgun destruction into a million pieces. Cutlery was flung back and forth in mid air. The malt machine turned on and spun a scoop of strawberry ice cream that had been leftover before it's power burnt out with a crackle of light.

" Grannie! Please! Not Grannie!! Not Grannie....", I cried and whimpered falling down from the red plastic egg crate onto the cold dry freezer floor where I cried and shivered.

Soon I fell into a deep somber crying to the sound of the dying wind and calming destruction.

I dreamed.