The Whooping Crane

Camille had grown up in the south, both feet sinking deep into the swamp’s soils, beneath curtains of cypress moss. Her dreams always felt sticky, as if the humidity could penetrate the veil of sleep, and she could never run far enough to escape the way her blood sang back to the cicadas in the summer.

She came from a long line of women who had been compared to hurricanes - howling, destructive beauties that you had to marvel at because raw power is nothing if not enchanting, even when it threatens to consume your life whole.

The wind screamed outside her kitchen windows, begging to be seen, to be known, to be acknowledged. It was the sort that bulldozes its way through row houses, punching against walls with the kind of force inspired only by grief. It howls the way children do when they lose their mothers and it doesn’t dampen the rain - it calls for its lover to rage along with it.

This is fine. I am fine.

Camille no longer lived in a town where the chance of experiencing a natural disaster each year was nearly 100%. Camille also had a therapist who taught her two things - one of which was the importance of self-talk, and the other which was that experiencing at least one hurricane a year was considered “traumatic.”

The hinges of the storm door screeched, cutting through the air like a cane knife, swift and ruthless and unapologetic in their scorn. It had been years since she’d experienced a storm this severe, with thrashing winds that caterwauled and rain that defied physics. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d lost power.

Camille’s footsteps seemed amplified without the familiar hum of electricity. The refrigerator was silent; the gentle whirrs of the computer were gone. The lightning outside briefly illuminated the outlines of her furniture, cleaving the sky in two over and over again.

The coffee table’s stout body was elongated in shadows, spindly legs stretching across a threadbare rug, like elephants on stilts. It was dark, but the windows let in enough moonlight to see everything in the darkest of grayscales.

“Five things I can see.” Magnolia painting. Vase of flowers from the farmer’s market. Car keys. Settlers of Catan. Stack of library books to return. “Four things I can feel.” Ultra soft old t-shirt. My hair. The pimple on my chin. Something wet on the floor. “Why is the floor wet?”

She walked just a little further into the room. Water lapped at her toes, cresting over the tops of her feet, and her chest tightened. She couldn’t breathe. Her insides had hardened, like lead, like concrete. Sloshing through the waves as they pushed around her calves, another bolt of lightning illuminated her living room, highlighting a large bird atop the cushions of her sofa. It towered over her from its place there, black tipped wings folded close to its body. Camille felt the need to curtsy in deference, and did so.

Straightening back up, she watched in horror as mildew climbed up the drywall, spores peppering a path from the baseboards upward to the crown molding. The familiar musty scent caught in her throat, pressing itself into her tonsils and her tongue. It was homes that had been left to the elements, tree limbs through ceilings and walls that had folded beneath the pressure of wind and water. It was like her world had turned into one attic, filled with water-logged photo albums and unsalvageable memories.

T-shirt tented over her mouth, she continued to wade through strings of moss and layers of silt toward her bathroom. Her breaths came short, wheezing in the damp air. A knob of panic founded the crux of her anxiety, settled in just beneath her sternum. She didn’t know who she was without her oldest friend; they were hand in hand on every first she’d ever had, and he welcomed her home after every long day, holding her closely as she ruminated late into the night.

“Three things I can hear.” The squeak of the faucet. The sink running. My own heartbeat.

Camille held fetid water in her cupped hands, staring down at whatever organisms swirled in the shallow depths of her palms. She could never get too far from home. She refilled her hands again and again, each time watching as crystal clear water turned murky. Taking a deep breath before splashing the water against her cheeks, the coolness nearly sizzled against her overwarm skin.

The panic began receding, like floodwaters pulling away after a storm surge. There was still a bulb of nausea that had taken up residence in her throat, but her limbs felt more steady as she carefully picked her way back through the waters. Camille pulled moss down from the tree limbs above her, winding it around her fingers, relishing the texture; it was soft, still green, and held so much water in its long, hair-like strands that she was nearly convinced she could ring them out.

The living room was still fairly quiet upon her return. The whooping crane sat like a gargoyle on the sofa still, watching her navigate through its habitat. She counted tadpoles in the water, let an unseen breeze lift her hair from her shoulders, and braided long, aquatic grasses into complicated knots. Her mother had taught her to French braid her hair in kindergarten, and even now, in her thirties, she offered it up to her friends generously and often. She knew love as an action. It was stirred into soups and woven into hair styles. Her love sat in the backseat when she waited outside the airport for friends’ flights to arrive, and it was sealed in the ink of long-winded letters.

What had started as hardly more than a draft was building, gusts of wind tugging at Camille’s sweater and pushing her towards her front door. Tears formed behind her eyeballs and she found it hard to swallow. If she fought back, her feet slid against underwater weeds and her furniture felt slick with algae, leaving no buoy to latch onto. In elementary school, they were told to run in a zig zag pattern to escape an alligator. They never said if that would work when you were running away from something your brain was convinced was more dangerous than a 500 pound reptile.

Camille allowed herself to be pushed toward her front door, refusing to assist, but capitulating nonetheless. The storm had not tempered, her anxiety had not eased, and the howling of the winds had combined, rendering her deaf. As she was pushed over the threshold, she released the remaining tension from her body, watching as her house emptied around her. Treefrogs and catfish and cottonmouths jumped, swam, and slithered out. Duckweed got stuck on the doorframe, fighting against the rush of swamp water. In the midst of it all, the whooping crane maneuvered with grace, coming out to meet her where she sat in her front yard. She’d been pushed over onto her hands and knees, and she no longer felt panicked. Her bones ached with an unbearable exhaustion, and her damp clothing clung to her.

In front of her, stretching upward to its full height, the crane unfolded its wings and took flight.