Instructions for Bottling Tornadoes: Please Read Before You Leave

1. Be careful. I have to say that. Otherwise the words will worm in my mind forever, insisting you’re hurt somewhere I can’t find, all because I did not remind you, once more, to be careful.

In the aftermath, I noticed the glass bottle first as it rolled down through the wreckage of my house, hopped a cracked board before coming to a circling stop in the dirt. Then I noticed you, your mauve coloring so close that I first confused it for the blue-death look of an infant left abandoned.

I almost turned you into the authorities. Almost gave you away, allowed you to be a newspaper sensation, your picture circulating, your future a timorous idea that might swamp you. Maybe you would have become a YouTube sensation, mauve skin coining a brand-new scientific condition, the wispy cloud speckles along your eyelids spawning a new makeup fad.

Maybe.

But I didn’t give you away. I kept you. I named you. I placed your shed teeth and cut hair into that rugged pale blue bottle that had housed the tornado you rode in on, the glass remaining steadfastly unbreakable.

2. Choose the right bottle, one strong enough to withstand the tumult of the wind, yet translucent enough to see the direction it churns. Otherwise, it may shatter when you summon its force, leaving you between worlds.

You learned about your arrival as soon as you could talk. I told you, like a bedtime story, about the tornado that appeared abruptly out of a clear, cloudless sky and destroyed my home. I explained how it had left you behind.

I never added that you destroyed that empty pocket that swelled so vastly inside of me.

You would play with the bottle that had brought you here—with any bottle really—once you understood. You pointed it, then swung yourself around and around before crushing some fairy house you’d built, standing straight up, and announcing that you’d arrived! Hello Mommy!

It wasn’t until after you caught your first glimpse of a real tornado on the television that your games changed.

I caught you running after dust devils out on the road so many times I lost count.

3. You must not chase a tornado, like news crews or adrenaline junkies, for you will be caught up in its chaos. Stand within its path, allow it to come to you.

We were not the same, you and I. This plain, with its fields and grasses and old farmhouse cottages and grand trees that stood so proud and alone, this was where I’d grown up. This was where I’d lived, assuming I’d be just as proud and alone as those singular trees on the horizon.

This was where you grew up too, but not where you should have grown.

You would ask for stories I couldn’t tell. You would beg to understand a world I’d never seen. You would wonder if you’d had another mother. Or a father. Or both. Or many.

The family pictures you drew with me and you holding hands morphed to me and you and a tornado, then me and you and many tornadoes. Then just you falling through the tornado, with faces looking down, watching you fall far and away. Into my waiting arms.

When I began to search for ways to help you find what you were instinctively looking for, I couldn’t tell you, for I worried. Worried you’d try on your own, become scared, avert your eyes, and be swept away.

4. Face the wind. Wear goggles if you must, but you cannot look away. You cannot allow yourself to flinch. For if you do, you will not be able to see its weak moment, when the air abruptly clears, for just a second, and you can glimpse the million million worlds rushing past.

You used to write me stories, of the place you’d blown in from. Graphic novels made with folded paper and colored pencils. And much imagination.

In some of your stories, you were a lost princess, sent out to survive a dreaded attack on your palace.

In some, you were the last of a magical race who just needed the right teacher to unlock all that was within.

In some, you were abandoned, your parents, if you even had them, tossing you within a weak tornado so they didn’t have to care for you.

You never did stop telling those stories. You just stopped writing them down. Stopped committing the thoughts to a sort of permanency. Letting them destabilize. Become amorphous, unsteady, untenuous.

5. Hold the bottle steady, for even a slight angle, one way or the other, will kick the bottle in your hand and whatever you have gathered thus far will come roaring back out in a furious flurry.

I wished you would start with the dust devils. Maybe you did. Maybe all those times I thought you were climbing the sycamore and then found you down by the pond were because you’d jumped through windy chaos.

A few meters. A few meters more.

Maybe you’d caught me practicing despite my precautions. Though, when I saw you last, your hands did not boast shattered-glass scars, nor were your eyes filled with pingueculae from dirt splattered into them constantly. I couldn’t ask though, for you no longer wanted stories. You wanted reality. You wanted to know.

So I doubted. And that scared me more.

Capturing the power to jump worlds was different than jumping across our backyard. It takes immense amounts of focus and strength. And practice. Much practice. Many bottles and many winds of varying strengths.

6. Carry more than one. Collect an arsenal of tornadoes. Let the bottles clatter at your belt before you leave the first time in case you jump to a world without angry, world-spanning winds.

In case you get stuck.

In case you need a swift exit.

In case you get homesick, but for me this time.