PHOTO SET ONE — 15 BURST — 3200 ISO — 1/200 SS — F8 — AF — AWB
God spit us up across the land that was the city—moving from my half-destroyed apartment to the street, I watch kids crawl up out of the earth like cicadas in summer, but instead of grass it’s jagged road pieces, which have been ripped and thrown by some giant being’s hot tempered outburst, and while dragging my feet I kick a Zyn pouch, and it clatters into some snapped two-by-four, which lies limply on top of an upturned dresser, opened letters spilling out of it into the mud, diffusing the ink into the earth and the water, which bleeds from destroyed city pipes and fire hydrants, so many of the shocked twenty-somethings staggering around what had been their yards are soaked to the bone and oblivious, many dirty and bleeding nonetheless, which feels ironic—there is so much grime and grief, it cannot ever be fully wiped off, though they try and scrape at their skin, some uninterested and some hysterical, all with a certain level of life lost out of their eyes, drowned in this sludge, not noticing—because of this, I move through it like a ghost, my press lanyard askew, hands on my Canon Rebel, letting the weight mostly hang from the nape of my neck to stop me from floating away while allowing me to scramble like a rock climber over the items, which just an hour ago remained private and defined life: televisions, door frames, dog kennels; all now objects on some landfill-like mound of ruined possessions—the bigger of which I am careful to step around, imagining people trapped under them, having their ribs snapped and lungs crushed by my clumsy weight, imagining them hating me as they die, and I, none the wiser to it, somehow living life with that invisible weight; while willing this from my head, I listen and hear nothing but gushing water, no birds or cars or music left to cover up its horribleness and magnitude, and maybe it’s because of what had just come from it, or the lack of structures to hide it, but the sky colludes with the quiet; it feels so large and heartless, and when I look up, I can imagine nothing except for it folding and collapsing in on us, showing mercy in some horrible way—then the illusion is broken by soft crying coming from inside a brick house, which I cannot help but move towards it—I am trained to do so—and technically climb through a window that is more of a massive hole since a branch has lodged itself in it, and it does not fully dawn on me until I see her that I am trespassing and should not be there in the hallway—I know this even though she does not see me, she is holding the dog’s head in the crook of her neck like an infant, close to her chest and tender, shaking so hard I cannot tell if it is breathing, but in staring so lovingly at it, she is unaware of her life, which lies scattered in ripped up bits all around her: her bed, her clothes, her vodka, her laptop, her everything—and I move to the side, so my shadow does not cast over her; the only cloudy and muted light comes from the holes behind me and above her, almost like a spotlight, and I am a willing audience by nature.
PHOTO SET TWO — 31 BURST — 1800 ISO — 1/120 SS — F11 — AF — AWB
It is terrifying to see trees stripped smooth and branchless—some refused to let go and were gnarled and shredded, snapped and disbursed around the neighborhood for me to kick through while dialing the photo desk again and again, thinking maybe now there will be signal, but there isn’t, which isn’t surprising—there are no ambulances yet, no paramedics or police officers in sight, so as I pass by those around me, people stare at my camera and my badge as if they expect something from me, though I have no idea what it could be—I emerged like them from a cellar and saw my life destroyed, every part of it except for my instinct and my camera and my duty to the public and to my newsroom, which I am sure has called me as well, and is now sending someone by bike or on foot to the area, and I am sure the paramedics are doing the same from the other end, working their way through this maze toward us, towards the silence and pooling water of the eastern part of the city with the old houses and college-aged kids—I am sure they are used to moving through the tight streets to pick up the alcohol poisoned, but now there are no streets left, and I wonder how they will get here at all—and there are figures on the horizon vibrating and bouncing, acting like objects rather than people, panicked and deep in it, where the city water line is broken, so that as I get closer to them, my shoes are filled with mud and sludge—when I look down at my feet, I notice that my legs are oozing, blood is radiating out into the murkiness, and these people are pointing at another woman who’s face-down on the ground, under the waterline, a streetlight pole lodged across her back, so stuck that the combined force of the people cannot lift it, and although they implore me to help, I step backwards and crouch, turn on manual and focus on the woman’s stillness until all of it is just smudges around her, framed the same way I have framed so many pictures before, with a third of it the ground and two-thirds of it the sky above, all lines pointing towards her as the horizon and past her those clouds, which have light bursting through the seams like the bottom of a doorway—more light than I had expected reflecting off the metal post and the floral-pink dress beneath it.
PHOTO SET THREE — 12 BURST — 1200 ISO — 1/250 SS — F16 — AF — AWB
They walk like survivors through it—the materials from the houses this far down spill out like intestines onto the street but never touch, and here there is a winding path forward that they follow unquestioningly, heads low and shoulders slumped, as if they are dragging themselves toward some certain end, and in the distance is the faint sound and sight of sirens, though the people there are just dots, and looking at us, I am suddenly struck by visions of funerals I have attended and feel so sick I may throw up, and I move away for privacy to do so, following the sometimes visible gravel of a driveway behind a mostly-standing house, realizing that the damage is dissipating, that we are getting further and further from the wound of it, and I hear birds again for the first time since emerging—I have never been able to differentiate them—singing normally and beautifully, and I puke against the wall of the house, again and again, expelling these thoughts from my stomach until my eyes are crying and vomit is lodged in my sinuses and dripping from my nose, hurting so badly, and I wipe it against the back of my hand and move on, so caught up in the stinging that I run into him and nearly knock him over, and I am suddenly embarrassed and afraid, but he sits down on the wood of one of his raised garden bed and invites me down next to him—we sit in silence like this, studying his tomato plants, which have just started curling around their supports, somehow mostly still rooted and safe, oblivious and beautiful, getting ready to produce fruit far heavier than the plant itself—and after staring at it for a long time, he gets up and moves over to his garden hose silently, filling a pitcher with water and carrying it back to the plants, pouring it over them so gently I assumed for a second they were made of glass.
PHOTO SET FOUR — 127 BURST — 1200 ISO — 1/250 SS — F21 — AF — AWB
I meet Terry behind the ambulance—when I finally got through to the editors they connected me with him, which was good, as he is tall enough to easily find, and his Nikon D6 is fitted with a telephoto lens that reflects siren light strikingly, but at first I don’t recognize him because his button-down is on all wrong, which isn’t like him at all; none of it is—not the way he is standing or his hair or the look he is giving me, as if I am his child, like something pathetic, and he’s holding out his free hand as if he’s expecting something from me, and I realize he is, so I grip my camera tighter, backing away, but he follows—of course he does, he is just like I am, except he is talking all wrong, about taking me off the story and media clearances and an area where no one is supposed to be, although people clearly are there, because I have seen them walking through it—holding onto their lives and refusing to see them as gone—taken away by the sky and replaced, and Terry’s on the phone with the newsroom editors and reporters who say they are thankful I’m alive but are all asking for him to get statements and recordings from anyone he can—they beg him to put me on the phone or let me drive his car back to the newsroom, but he refuses and says that I’m bleeding, that I’m in shock, but I feel fine, and after he hangs up he asks me where I want to go, but when I think of all places I know, I can’t imagine returning to any of them—there is nowhere left for me to go, so I swing the camera up and take pictures of where the tornado came from, trying so hard to find it again, to relocate all our runaway lives in this mess and put it in my memory card, so we can never have it taken from us again.
Macy lives in Missouri. Last year, all tornadoes were diverted by the river. Her work has appeared in Burial Magazine, Midcult*, and HAD.