Free Broken Branch by John Mantooth Page A

the shelter anymore. She lost her footing, but they held her up and dragged her backward.
    The men picked her up and for an instant, she felt as if the demon was fully awake in her—she was swinging her arms and kicking her legs so violently. It felt good to have the demon, and in that moment, she never wanted the demon to leave because she always wanted to feel this kind of anger thrumming through her like whipcrack lightning. She’d been set on fire with it and the last thing she remembered before tumbling into the darkness was scratching her fingernails deep into the side of Otto’s face.
    Then she hit the bottom and pain bloomed inside her hip so strong and loud that nothing else seemed to matter except the light above her, and her desire to see it, but then the hatch swung closed, and she heard the men sliding a heavy rock across the top of the hatch.

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    She slept and didn’t wake until she heard the thunder booming outside the shelter. Climbing hand over hand, she reached the top of the ladder and pushed with everything she had, but the hatch didn’t move. From here, she could hear the rain battering the top of the hatch. Somewhere, she heard the crack of wood, and she knew lightning had struck a tree. She wanted out, not for herself but for Rodney and Mary. Was anyone with them? Both would be scared during this kind of storm, especially Rodney. She pounded on the door with both fists, as hard and as loud as she could, until her fists began to bleed. In the end, she climbed back down the ladder and lay on the dirt floor, feeling defeated.
    When the twister came, it happened very quickly. It must have been a terrible one because she could hear it from deep inside the shelter as it developed. First the rain changed. It seemed less insistent or maybe it was just being drowned out by the rumble of the tornado, churning up everything in its path and spitting it back out. She tried to think of something to compare the sound to, but the best she could come up with was the ocean. She’d been once or twice as a girl, and she loved to stand in it, wet up to her knees, and wait for the next wave to come. When the wave crashed over you, it made a sound—brief, momentary—but in that brief second the world itself would disappear inside that sound, and you knew that nothing else but that wave mattered. The twister sounded like the waves from her memory except it was one hundred, maybe one thousand times more powerful. The worst part was the trees. She heard their branches popping off, their trunks splitting. Their roots being ripped from deep within the soil. She imagined them spinning into the vortex of wind and being shot straight into heaven above.
    Yet she was safe. That was the sad irony. The worst storm couldn’t touch her, but her children were pitifully exposed. She was safe and dry, but she’d have given up that safety in a heartbeat if she could have the chance to be with Rodney and Mary.
    â€œGod help them,” she said out loud and was surprised when she realized she meant it.

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    She slept for a while and dreamed of a vast swamp, and an alligator that roamed the water, its snout only occasionally showing itself above the murkiness. Rodney and G.L. were there and there was a cabin, with a single lamp burning inside. A light mist of rain fell, yet the stars were bright beside a half-moon.
    The danger, G.L. explained to her, was the alligator. “There’s always one. I asked him why he had to be the alligator, why he couldn’t just be like the heron”—he pointed across the swamp at a bird standing on one leg, its long neck craning forward, studying the water—“or a fish that swims in the swamp and doesn’t bother nobody. You know what he said?”
    Trudy shook her head and waited for him to tell her, but it wasn’t G.L. that spoke. It was Rodney.
    â€œHe said that he’s not like the heron or the fish. He said that he doesn’t fit