Third Place: Fiction The Imperfect Storm Logan Thies, Fayette
“...this is the greatest invention ever made. It will help us grow crops without problems and guarantee natural disasters will never happen again...” The radio drones on, but I stop listening. Nowhere in that did they have actual scientific backings. “Charlie! We need to leave, you can’t be late again,” my mother yelled from downstairs. Thank God we don’t have neighbors close, otherwise we’d get complaints often. The woman could yell. “I’m coming!” I yelled back. On my way down the stairs, I saw the paint-chipped walls. Crops hadn’t been doing well the past couple years, so we couldn’t afford to fix our leaking roof. At least if this weather machine worked, we’d be able to produce more crops. At the bottom of the stairs, I came face to face with my thirteen-year-old brother, Chris. Ignoring his existence as usual, I walked to the kitchen to find my mother beaming out the window. At least one of us was excited today. They’re supposed to start controlling the weather today. Aren’t you excited Charlie?” my mother says. I replied, “Not really.” Rolling her eyes at me, she pointed towards the door signaling we needed to get in the car. My little sister Beth—chipper as ever—sang songs and talked the entire way to school. When we finally got to school, I got out without a word. School had always been a love/hate thing for me. I loved science and my best friend Brad, but I hated the whole social aspect of it. I walked into the classroom and sat down for class. The teacher talked about the weather machine as if we hadn’t already heard about it a thousand times. After class I stayed and talked to Brad about how dumb the machine was. Before we could really talk too much, I looked out the window and saw a huge tornado coming our way. Suddenly our principal’s voice screeched over the loud speaker and said, “The weather machine has malfunctioned. Everyone go to your designated places.” Everything was chaos, then it was oddly calm. I looked out the window to see it pouring. I then saw a decaying human hit the window, and that’s when I jumped into action. Running down to the elementary and middle school, I grabbed my siblings Chris and Beth. Running with them back to the storage closet, I saw my mother down the hall. My mother grabbed us all and took us to a place we’d never been before: the janitor’s closet. After taking us inside there, she opened another secret door and ushered us through what appeared to be another world. In this other world, we were bombarded by lights coming from all directions. Once our eyes adjusted, we saw where we were. We were on what looked like an 87
