VOICES FROM THE STORM
Installment No. 2
First, the children...
The Worst and Best of Times
by Curtis Tucker
It was in a Hurricane on a rainy windy day when everything went wrong, but out of that it was the best time ever. In this story you will hear about many things that go wrong and a few will go right. You will know how miserable it was.
The worst things that happened when Wilma came was when the power went out. Then our roof blew off, at the same time all the telephone poles fell down. After that, our back window near our pool started to blow out first "8" inches then "9" inches. While that was blowing in and out my mom, my brother, and I gathered all the stuff in the living room. While we were doing that my dad drilled wood into the wall so the window would hold. After the storm there was a lot of damage.
The best thing that happened before and after Wilma were that all of my family was together and we could play board games. After the storm my whole family went to Georgia. We stayed with my grandmother. We got to see all my aunts and uncles up there. There we were able to go hunting and fishing. Meanwhile, when we were there we went trick or treating.
Out of all of that I had the best and worse time ever. Meanwhile, it was the scariest time ever.
My name is Curtis James Tucker age 10, I attend Christ Church School in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and have since Kindergarden. I live with my father Curtis, mother Alice and brother Chad. I am in the fifth grade. I was born in Plantation, Florida and have lived in Florida my whole life. I love to read, hunt, and fish. I play scoccer, football and panio. I love the outdoors.
A Story of the Worst... or the Best
by Eryn Hughes
On October 24th, in South Florida, the horrible and devastating hurricane Wilma hit. Many people lost belongings, and no one had electricity. The experience was like a needle in a haystack. To use it felt like one piece of hay and one million needles.
But at least one good thing comes out of a bad.The needle in this whole situation was Hurricane Wilma. This storm made history! It started at 6:30 A.M. and went on until what seemed like forever.
Wilma came in at a strong category three. The force of the wind knocked down 60% of trees, and could possibly make shutters blow off. Kids were off of school for up to three weeks! It was a true time of devastation.
However, a lot of the situation was good. The day after the storm, my friends, Arianna and Deanna, came over. We spent the day building a clubhouse that we named Beach Rock.
The storm also made people work together. It helped us appreciate what we had. It also was a time to spend quality time with your family and friends. Lots of good came out of one bad.
Now you know how many good things come out of one bad thing. The bad experience may have been once in a life time, but I will remember the good times more than the bad.
Eryn Hughes is 10 years old and she attends Christ Church School
in Ft. Lauderdale. Two of her all-time favorite things to do are playing the
piano and playing soccer. She also loves to read and learn about new
things. Poetry is also something she likes to write. She loves to spend time with friends and family. Her mother is Cuban and her father is Irish-American.
She lives in Pompano Beach, Florida and lived through Hurricane Wilma.
Worst of Times, Best of Times
by Arianna Garvin
It was the worst of times, and it was the best of times when Wilma came to Florida on October 24. It was like you planted a seed and you weren't sure if it was good or not but something wonderful came out of it. It was like a caterpillar who was ugly until he became a butterfly. On October 24, it was the worst of times, and it was the best of times.
On that day Wilma came. Who was Wilma?. She was a hurricane that hit South Florida. After the hurricane I went around with my family to see all the damage Wilma caused. She had taken so many trees down. Some people had trees fall on top of their houses and some people lost some of their favorite trees that had been there for so many years. Wilma caused damage to some houses also. All the trees practically had no more leaves on them and almost everybody lost power. Everyone was very sad but on October 24, it was the worst of times, and it was the best of times.
The hurricane didn't only bring bad things, but it brought wonderful things. We met so many neighbors that we never really knew. The weather was perfect. It wasn't very hot, it was nice and cool. We still didn't have power, but it didn't really matter anymore. We also got to spend more time with our family. Soon people were working in their yards and some kids got to earn money by helping clean up, outside. Kids were also very happy because there was no school. Once it started getting hotter, people were going on trips. Slowly, things were getting back to normal, but having no power wasn't that bad.
Now you know about Wilma. You also know how it brought the worst of times, and the best of times. Let me tell you something, now remember, there is always a good side in everything no matter what it is.
My name is Arianna Garvin and I attend Christ Church School in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. I am in the fifth grade and I am 11 years old. I enjoy surfing, skateboarding, reading, and hanging out with my friends. My favorite subject is English and I have been very lucky this year because I have the best English teacher in the world, Mrs. Fletcher. Thank you for publishing my story!
And now for the grown-ups...
During Wilma
by Lauren Finaldi Gurus
Half a day holed up,
sheltered in close shadows
from projectile pines and
ricocheted S-tiles clanging
against aluminum armor,
I laid safe on my mattress,
empowered by the wind's angry whistle,
and sex to the orchestra of destruction.
Right After Wilma
by Lauren Finaldi Gurus
I thrust open double doors
for fresh swirling gusts
to tingle my pores
and drink in defused light of day;
but I hadn't prepared my eyes.
Thick Crown of Thorn
that adorned my entry
now lay limp, beaten;
I open the screen door,
ripping some out.
Bare bougainvillea clinging
to its tilted trellis
pricks my finger
when I attempt to right it,
producing a single, neon red,
drop of blood.
Scattered pine limbs are frozen
in a prolonged game of Statue
with gnarled downspouts
snapped fronds,
unidentifiable shards of plastic,
macabre decorations,
early Halloween.
The Day After Wilma
by Lauren Finaldi Gurus
Impromptu block parties
of rakers and grillers
with post-hurricane highs
swap stories, assess loss,
share thawing chicken legs,
barter water for gas.
Mounds of natural debris
grow in rows
crowding the drive.
I lament the loss
of a neighbor's three oaks,
the view out my front window
forever changed.
Kids swarm on bikes,
scooters, skates,
indefinitely free from school
to taste the world
without Nintendos
and cable TV.
Some neighbors meet
for the first time
and others get caught up,
everyone basking
in this newfound brotherhood.
Lauren Finaldi Gurus lives in Boynton Beach, Florida, and while she was without electricity, water, phone service, etc. during and after Wilma last month, she wrote poems about the experience. "I had to use paper and pen, which I am usually too spoiled by the computer to deal with." She is a wife, mother and poet, with several poems published in literary ezines, including Poems Niederngasse and The Centrifugal Eye. A forthcoming edition of the Cup of Comfort book series will include a story she wrote about parenting her autistic stepson.
When the Chainsaws Stopped
by Diane Elayne Dees
When the chainsaws stopped buzzing,
I heard green cardinals calling
red mates to sunset dinner.
When the chainsaws stopped whirring,
I heard squirrels scrambling up pine trees
in search of their homes, long blown
across blurs of highway.
When the chainsaws stopped whining,
I heard the news on the radio —
that we do not know how to help
ourselves; we are the new welfare queens,
drowning in a lake of self-pity, our
American know-how lost somewhere
between the Superdome
and the middle of next week.
When the chainsaws stopped humming,
I heard the levee crack, then the silence
of the lost, broken only
by the occasional crunch of
car wheels on debris.
Evacuation
by Diane Elayne Dees
From my bed in an old hotel near cotton fields,
I watch a horror movie on the snowy television.
The setting is familiar, the plot outlandish,
the characters desperate. It is too much for one
story--children clinging to roofs, cars in trees.
Retrievers and poodles, only yesterday,
playing ball and eating biscuits, now a moving pile
of debris on deserted streets. Outside my room,
the heat overwhelms.
On the Web, people are searching for us,
offering us houses. The cats dance
on the window sill, enteraining drunken smokers
who leave the bar's bad music for the fresh air
of the patio. The room is small, the ice chest essential.
Then the television again--the plot thickens
like the icing on a birthday cake somewhere
in the desert. I injure my arm using a touchpad
like a weapon in the desert. I am trapped but safe,
like a crazy woman holed up in a room with a gun,
only it isn't a gun, it is a computer, and though my aim
is true, no one storms the door to force me out.
Not a soul, because they have all retreated
to their living rooms to watch "Survivor."
Diane Elayne Dees is a writer and psychotherapist in Louisiana. Her poetry, fiction, essays, and creative nonfiction have appeared in many publications. Diane also publishes a blog, The Dees Diversion, and she and her husband are the webmasters of Princess Cafe, the world's only virtual rock and roll restaurant. Diane's poetry has been recently published or is forthcoming in The Binnacle, Out of Line, Passager, and HazMat Literary Review. Some of her poems are now being read on "The Naturalist's Datebook," a segment of Martha Stewart Living Radio.
A Summer Cleansing
by Francis Caravoy
We watched on TV as the floodwaters took possession of our house — a natural law of eminent domain. We didn't see our house specifically but we knew the area where we lived had been flooded. My daughter asked if her fish Buster would be o.k. I said he was swimming in the Gulf of Mexico now. Maybe he's still swimming around the house because he likes it there, she said.
I thought about her goldfish living in our house without us, swimming through our living room set and exploring underneath our beds. I found the thought strangely comforting. You know what Honey, I said, I think you're right. We didn't talk about the cleanliness of the water.
We live in New Orleans, or we did until that day. We're living in Ponchatoula now but I still consider myself to live in New Orleans because that's where I work and we'll be moving back there soon. I may be the only one, but I don't like the thought of the government rebuilding my city. I'm not interested in efficiency, I like things that don't fit together quite right.
I always have to explain, when I talk to people who aren't from New Orleans, that I wasn't stranded at the Convention Center or waving from my rooftop. They seem disappointed when they hear that, as though I missed the whole event. Here's how it happened for me.
On August 26 we watched the news and saw that Katrina was headed squarely in our direction. I've lived in New Orleans for twenty-five years so I am well aware, as everyone in the world now is, of the levy situation here. I told my family to get their stuff together.
I called work the next morning to let them know that I was leaving town and wouldn't be in until after the storm had passed. They were quite understanding as most people with any sense were doing the same thing. We drove to Ohio because I have relatives there and I figured, if Katrina had any strength by the time she got there, God was targeting me specifically and I wasn't safe anywhere.
In the months since the storm, our lives have returned to normal. We visited our old house for the same reason people look at loved ones in the morgue, not because you don't believe that they're dead, but because you need see it for yourself. There was nothing in the house worth recovering, not one thing. My wife made me take the house numbers with us so at least we'd have some memento of our time there but they stank so bad that we threw them out the window halfway to our new house.
Our house in New Orleans was a total loss but we have big plans for the insurance check. It's not often you get to start over again from scratch. We had a lot of trash stored in the closets and garage anyway, things that we never used but for some reason couldn't bring ourselves to throw away. So I just think; that's less stuff for me to have to sort through some day. Our lives have been forcibly decluttered.
When we returned to Louisiana we had a lot of shopping to do. We laughed at the mall in Baton Rouge as we ate ice cream and bought new clothes. We laughed with unfettered abandon like we'd finally reached the punch line of a long joke. I felt liberated, like Buster; released from my glass bowl to swim free again. We don't talk about the pollutants in our water.
Francis Caravoy once raced a train on his bicycle and won, but just barely. He is now an economist and freelance writer who lives along the Gulf Coast. He has traveled extensively throughout the Middle and Far East and is currently working on a collection of short stories based on his experiences in Iraq. This is the first time his writing has appeared in flashquake.
Once Upon A Mardi Gras by Utahna Faith
Photo taken by unknown reveler on New Orleans, Lower Decatur Street
Alterations by Hurricane Katrina floodwaters
On Royal Street by Utahna Faith
Nick and a blue dog
Alterations by Hurricane Katrina floodwaters
Sunflower by Utahna Faith
Alterations by Hurricane Katrina floodwaters
Healing Waters
by Elyn Selu
Steam floats off the water in a genuine, claw-footed tub. Of course it's genuine, this is New Orleans, in a friend of a friend's dry home. A real bath after weeks of rushing through quick, tepid showers, coaxing drips of shampoo from the bottom of bottles and drying off with used, damp towels.
After scrounging in a kitchen I don't know, the red and blue box of matches comes to me like a prize. I pull crisp cellophane off the vanilla candle and light it. Then I pour white crystals from a carton of epsom salts into the steaming water.
Still haunting me are the reassuring words I gave to my mother when we bought the house, "Our yard is backed by a 30-foot high, concrete wall. The canal will never breach."
The bath water smells of chlorine. I'm grateful it doesn't smell of the waxy mud I've spent the day scraping off the dishes and wine bottles pulled out of my levee-wrecked house.
Under the swamp stink there is something that burns, like the smell of a petro refinery at full blast. The rot wraps around your throat and fills your pores. It grabs you at the entry to any neighborhood where dark brown lines stain the sides of houses, pink insulation and drywall spill onto the street like guts, and the trees stick out of the dirt like kindling.
I sink into the hot water, white flesh blushing in the heat. My defenses melt as the salt water takes me. I float, letting the sea pull the poison and grief from my skin. As flesh, muscle and bone dissolve, I forget my rage against the floods.
Elyn Selu is the author of the novel, Pretty is Just a Face I Make, available on amazon.com, and numerous short stories and essays. Having made her home in New Orleans for 13 years, she is relocating to Oregon where it's rumored that hurricanes have no jurisdiction. She is currently working on her first screenplay.
Torn
by Phyllis L. Geller
The screens are torn, wind
whips through empty space
Trees in the once-green tropics
are winter-like, grass
is mottled with fallen leaves
The lake has turned gray
In the eye of destruction, change is born
Ducks, once locked out of encapsulation,
wander on the rain-soaked patio
The sun glints on a bird of paradise
and air is soft like spun silk
Although the bushes no longer shield the road,
I can see movement, drivers heading to work once more
My heart may be torn open by wind and rain,
but the empty space allows for new growth to emerge
Phyliss L. Geller is the publisher and editor of the Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. VOL III, including Philip Levine, was recently published. She is also a published poet. Her work appears on the Internet and in poetry journals. Ms Geller is a practicing psychotherapist. Recently, she has survived the wrath of Hurricane Wilma. This poem was inspired by the hurricane. Although Wilma did not get the press that Katrina did, the damage was devastating for people living in Southeast Florida.
Black Eyes
by Sybil Pittman Estess
When each item had been swept away
by wind or water, and the chaos labeled
5, or 4 or 3, came death, or displacement.
Refugees, rebuffed, had been struck
by the eye. They were left with breath
but diaspora. Only their memory remained —
maimed. They began again, bereft. Perhaps
with one friend. What's left to salvage?
No house, picture to hold, to help heal.
Green bushes are gone, and trees are
salt-watered at best. Tossed bombs
are not the whole of horror. Each of us
(if only by TV) has been a host to some
lost child recalling when wild waters
climbed high, then higher. Their nightmares
again. Some survivors waved white "Save Us"
flags seven days. Sometimes someone came
to those rags or signs, by a boat. But where
should they flee next from bloated New Orleans?
From Pass Christian or Bay St. Louis, or Biloxi?
Thousands will be where, and for how long?
From South Mississippi (January, 2006)
by Sybil Pittman Estess
Skies are gray today, tepid
January. Down the short hill
where I walk every winter here
the greenest rye grass usually grows.
Deer see me if I come late evenings
or early in morning. So today I descend,
expect the same pasture, the fish pond.
But the whole hamlet, it seems, changed.
Someone has burned dead, uprooted oaks
here. Stumps smoke. So this year I find
only ash and waste. Though the buck
may hide and still stare from deep
in pines beyond, which the September
storm left standing, I cannot see them.
On my walk, admid a morass of brown
dry debris of vines and bushes piled
high from Katrina's ravages, one male
red cardinal. Yet in this charred place,
such a shocked, pure, empty black.
Sybil Pittman Estess is from Houston, where she has lived for 29 years. She is the author of a new book of poems, Blue, Candled in January Sun, which was recently reviewed by Robert Phillips in the Sunday Houston Chronicle. This volume is with WordTechCommunications, and can be ordered from them or from Barnes and Nobles or Amazon.com. Estess's other books are: Seeing the Desert Green (poems); Elizabeth and Her Art (criticism); and In a Field of Words, a creative writing textbook written with Janet McCann, for Prentice-Hall. Estess has published in journals such as The Texas Review, and The Paris Review.