The Story

“Storm.”

“Absolutely not,” she strode across the room to stand just a few feet from me, her long navy jacket flowing behind her like a cape, “you need to take this seriously.”

“I am taking this seriously.”

“No, you’re not. If you were, you’d know we have already had a hundred Storms, and a hundred more variations on Storm: Storm Bringer, Storm Shaker, Storm Leader, Hailstorm, Hailstrum, Tempest, Cyclone, even Icy The Storm- and yes in every language. Squall, Thunder, Thunderstorm, Lightening, Cloudburst-“

“Cloudburst?”

“Yes, it’s when clouds… burst… into a storm.” She was rubbing her temples now. It made the silver streaks she often pushed behind her ears fall forward.

“How about Stratus? Strat-miss?”

“Al’s family tree is clouds, as you well know.”

“Oh, right. How about Gale?”

“Just… no.”

This is not how I imagined this moment going. I thought there would be a little fanfare, some well-mannered celebrating. At least a glass of champagne.

Instead I was in my aunt’s basement, with her friend Tidal, spending more time on my code name than acknowledging that I had passed every single test to get into the Guild of Underground Atmospheric Guardians for Earth, or GUAGE.

I started training when I was eleven years old, after accidentally calling a lightening strike to the neighborhood pool. It was a perfectly sunny summer day, the sky as blue as a berry and clear as glass. A teenage boy wouldn’t stop dunking my little brother and I in the deep end, holding one of us in the water until the other was able to tackle his arm, and then he’d switch victims. My fury and distress manifested as I saw the bubbles rising above my brother again, and the next moment the teen is screaming, lifeguards are whistling like an off key orchestra, and my mother is pulling me from the water, already on the phone with her sister.

“She’s done it,” my mother whispered into the mouthpiece, wrapping towels around my brother and me, “Yes! Lightening. No no, no one’s hurt. Yes, we’re on the way the home- meet us there.” She smiled down at me while the other parents’ faces were creased with worry and shouting for their children.

And then it started. Weekends out in the mountains to practice, tudors for every science class, a full ride to Cornell in Meteorology. While my roommates gallivanted off in search of the next house party, I stayed behind to monitor the tiny cyclone I’d stirred up in my tea mug.

With graduation, came the tests. I had withstood hurricanes, conjured hail, recoiled tornadoes, was even given the Rainbow Ribbon for passing all the trials with literally flying colors. But no, I was disappointing Aunt Lynda because I couldn’t come up with a unique code name.

“Do I have to decide this now?”

“You will be a part of GUAGE for the rest of your life, my dear. You will hopefully have a legacy. And most importantly, everyone in the guild knows you’re my niece. So I cannot have the family name ruined with a bad… family name.”

Her green eyes glinted behind her thick glasses. I think I did sense some pride in there, almost doused by the seriousness she was trying to express to me with her perfectly shaped eyebrows.

“Well, if you’re Disdo-Ma’ameter, maybe I should be an instrument too.”

Her forefinger stopped digging into her right temple so she could place her hand on my shoulder instead, “It’s got to feel right. I appreciate the sentiment, but we don’t need a Baro-Ma’meter and so on. Because then they all start to sound stupid.”

I sat back down in the brown, practically wilting, lazyboy. I watched Tidal watch me for a minute. Then I turned my gaze to the arm of the chair, and began picking at a loose thread.

I’d wanted to be part of GUAGE since the very beginning. When Aunt Lynda burst into our foyer, hair wet with rain and eyes on fire, she scooped me up and held me tightly. “It’s a downpour out there! Well done! We’ve got one, Lacy!” she called to my mother as she twirled me. Then she set me down, pulled a wrinkled and torn journal from her bag, and told me about GUAGE. She held my hand from that moment to when I took my vows, just an hour ago.

“We are the weathermen, the weatherwomen, the weather people of the world. We are the wind in the hurricane, the ice in the blizzard. We are the gauge of the world, for the world. I take these vows to monitor, interpret, and engage with the atmosphere of our world for the betterment of all peoples, everywhere.”

I’d known the lines for a decade. Hell I could say them in Latin.

Next I would get my assignment: Once assimilated into GUAGE, I would be either put onto a search team, or made into a small TV personality to guard my assigned region. I secretly was hoping for the search team. How amazing would it be to scope out the very ends of the earth and even outside of it- to see the real forces we were interacting, and occasionally fighting, with.

But alas, I’d inherited by mother’s cherry curls and my father’s wide mouth, so I was destined to entice the elderly and the morning people with my winning personality on Channel 4. And you know, occasionally keep them alive by taking on the arrant tsunami while making it look like I’d just misread a rain watch. The usual.

“Surge…” I watched her eyebrow rise with suspicion, “…ess? Surgess?”

The eyebrow froze, then softened. Then she turned completely towards Tidal.

He nodded, grumbling, “The last Surgess passed away over 30 years ago, it’s up for grabs and doesn’t have much of its own legacy yet.”

“Then it’s perfect.” Aunt Lynda, the Disdo-Ma’ameter beamed at me finally, “Tidal, let everyone know, Surgess will take her place in Fort Myers by dawn.”

She hugged me tightly, then held me at arms length to stare right at me.

“Fort Myers? Storm central.” I whispered in awe.

“You’ve earned it. So now the real work begins.”

The Word

Furor (noun): An outbreak of public anger or excitement; a wave of enthusiastic admiration, a crazy.

This was directly inspired by the snow predicted for my city being over 4 hours late. And then I got the silly idea that weathermen/women/people predict things wrong on purpose sometimes, for of course superhero reasons- like they’re battling a large ice monster, they need to get an old lady safely back in her house before a hurricane, or they want to get their milk and bread from the store before everyone else.

Sometimes, stories don’t have to have a deeper meaning or magical inspiration. Sometimes, stories and prompts can just be fun. Like a snowday 😉