Remember how I used to make you practice saying words?

I’d say, Repeat after me: Egg, and you’d lean back ever so slightly like you were about to take off and then go, AIG! An emphatic Oklahoman always.

Although each time for one split second (German: Augenblick, literally blink of an eye, in blink’s oldest meaning of starry fleeting gleam) you’d just sit there and wait for my face to tell you whether you had done it right.

And then I’d scowl, and you would look away.

Their mom gets them ready for all the possible disasters that might ever occur

So she reads aloud the headlines from The Tulsa World at breakfast while Amy and Zoe eat their Cheerios. Sometimes their mom mixes bananas up inside their Cheerios, but oftentimes she gets distracted by all the different disasters, and the bananas just stay where they are on the counter and turn brown and get mushy until she puts them in the freezer. Then the freezer fills up with frozen brown bananas until at some point their dad comes and puts them in the trash.

The girls stay quiet while their mother reads, but they don’t really listen. All they know is that there is always a disaster happening somewhere. Besides tornados there are earthquakes, and plane crashes, and wars. There is the story of the shibboleth, which means when you can’t cross the river because you say the words wrong, and then you get murdered. There is an AIDS epidemic, although neither Amy nor Zoe knows what AIDS is. They only know they are supposed to wash their hands.

When she takes her baths their mom reads them articles from Good Housekeeping. She never takes showers because she says she saw a movie one time where the main character got killed while she was taking a shower, and then there was blood everywhere. She likes for the girls to keep her company while she’s in the bathtub. 

Sometimes she tells family stories. She always tells everyone the one about the crazy neighbor from down the cul-de-sac who shot his family and then hid in the big tree in the backyard. Their dad was off in Stillwater running one of his workshops. So their mom went and picked his rifle up and prepared herself to do whatever was necessary to protect them. She put Amy under the bed and told her to stay there no matter what, and not to make a sound. No matter what, she repeats, and every time she tells the story her voice gets thick there.

Zoe was still a baby and had to be held. Even though she was a baby she could sense that something was wrong because she would not stop crying, and that made you think, says their mother, about those women in the Holocaust who had to smother their own kids so they wouldn’t get discovered.

Amy and Zoe know the Holocaust was when the Jewish people all got murdered for no reason while at camps. What they can’t figure out is what Jewish means, or if the camp where they go every summer could kill them and their mother, although so far none of what their mother says could kill them really has. 

So their mother had Zoe in one arm, wailing, and the gun in the other. The police were there already and had him surrounded. They knew this from the TV because even though it was literally right there in their backyard their mom knew she had to stay away from the windows in case a bullet came through. The crazy neighbor kept shooting and shooting and even shot one of the other neighbors who had come over to help the police. 

Here their mother pauses and looks around every time she tells the story.

But the man who got shot chewed tobacco. And he happened to be chewing tobacco right then. The bullet went in through his cheek at an angle like this—their mother points to her cheek using her forefinger as a pistol—but instead of going on into his throat and finishing him off it lodged in his tobacco! 

Everyone always likes that part, which the girls don’t understand because they know that tobacco will kill you too, and besides they see this neighbor all the time sitting out on his porch spitting out his black juices into a big tin pail, skin and bones and ragged-looking, that ugly old scar on his face.

But Amy hates the whole story. She can’t remember being alone under the bed, but she’s heard about it so much she can picture it, so much so that sometimes she has dreams about it: Zoe orbiting around, crying, out of her reach.

In the end, the crazy neighbor shot himself, and then he died.

Even though she knows she’s not supposed to, Amy looks forward to tornados

Even in the day the sky gets black, and the streets get empty. The wind pries back the leaves of the silver maple tree, and underneath they gleam.

When it’s a tornado watch they don’t do it, but when it’s a tornado warning, the girls go and get inside the pantry, where they squeeze in among the cans and powders and cardboard boxes and wait until one of their parents says they can come out. The pantry is the only place in the whole house that does not have windows. You have to stay away from windows when a tornado comes because the very thing tornados love best is breaking glass, and if that happens, and you’re sitting for example in the bathtub right below the bathroom window, you will almost inevitably get hurt.

When the sirens start, Amy gets them organized. She has developed a system. Each of them is allowed three toys, not more, and Amy is in charge of the flashlight because Zoe might break it. Zoe always dallies over her dolls, feeling guilty for playing favorites. But Amy explains to her how in life you have to make choices, and eventually Zoe always does, although sometimes she tries to hide things in her tiny pants pockets.

When she gets caught she bursts out laughing or into tears depending on Amy’s face. She always gets caught. Then Amy quiets Zoe, and they kneel down on the dimpled linoleum, pull the door shut, and wait.

Once the door is closed, Zoe’s dolls have conversations. Often they discuss the weather. Amy just listens, lets her own dolls rest, feels her sister’s hot quick breaths on her neck. If their electricity isn’t out, Amy insists the light be off anyway. Slowly she gets sleepy like she does in the car, and just like when they drive somewhere, Amy, unlike Zoe, would rather just not get there, would rather just keep going, would like it if the warning never expired. Then the pantry door will fly wide open, and all across the top of it the frying pan and the strainer and all the knives will glint and shiver like they want to fall. And their mother will reach down and grab Zoe, and then she’ll carry her away.

Do you ever wonder where words come from, Zoe?