Up on top of the cabinets, up in the shadows where the mice and spiders played, sat a lone Mason jar. The green glass was so murky it was hard to tell just what it held, even though everyone in the family knew, down to the penny, the contents ... and the mother held tight a stubborn, and certain embedded kind of belief, that the jar was the only thing between her family and certain catastrophe.

"Can't we buy some candy, Mama? Please? Just this once'st?" The young daughter pleaded, her blue eyes wide with anticipation, and her pony tail switched across her shoulders as she bounced up and down clinging with greasy fingers to her mother's apron. "Not this time, Janie, maybe someday. You know we need the money for a rainy day." The woman kept washing the jars, and pots and pans, her mind already on the next chore.

"You're a fat cow, Janie. Don't need no candy." The son, almost ten, and sure he was a man, spoke with authority and assurance against his sister. He'd known, in all his big brother wisdom, that her question would be shot down. Shot down, and shushed up, just like a hungry hawk circling the hen house.

"Am not. You're the cow. COW!" With that the child stuck out her tongue, which was an odd shade of turquoise blue, and razz-berried her brother just as a book sailed by her red head.

"Can we have more Pixie Stix, Mama? How come we always run out so fast?" Janie fumbled with her shoestrings and made knots that no mother could help undo ... especially one busy with canning and putting up the winter's stock. A tune sang by the all female choir at the nearby non-denominational church, where the mother took her two offspring every Sunday, kept going 'round and 'round in her head, all but completely blocking out the sound of her children as they bickered and fussed--and this fragile reverie was shattered like porcelain on cement, as a clap of thunder from the clear blue sky, or God's own hands, rocked the small white rent house. It shook the whole world it seemed. Even the cabinets inside, up where the old green jar sat, danced a jig to the rolling rumble.

"Oh, dear. There's a storm a comin'. You'in's stay inside, now. Com'ere, Janie. Jubel. Help me with these beans." The seriousness of thunder in the middle of a sun-shiny day didn't quite register with the mother, who was engrossed in her canning, and fighting the heat of the late August day. The heat was suffocating ... and the little G.E. fan oscillating and whirring faithfully away in the corner, only seemed to make it hotter. She wanted rain. A good, hard, God-sent soaking would cool the air, and she'd be able to breathe again.

"Mama! Come quick! Look'it the sky!" Jubel reverted back to childhood status. The 'butterflies in his stomach' kind of fear put him in his place, and he wanted reassurance from a grown-up now.

"Yeah, Mama, com'ere!" Both children stood on the front porch ... the sky to the southwest was black as their nearest neighbor, old Kirby. And the furnace hot air suddenly felt like January ice as the wind whipped around their legs, warning of the coming rainstorm.

"Oh, kids. Let's go back in. Come on, now." Like the hens who protected their chicks, she wrapped her arms around her children and pulled them back inside the front door, terror suddenly slamming her in the guts. "Git to the cellar. Now. Let's go." She'd seen the circle going around in the angry thunderhead and knew it was a twister headed straight for them, and sent from the Devil himself. She began to pray inside her head, and she grabbed a quilt that'd been hand sewn by her own mother, the children's grandmama, not all that long ago, and as she threw it over Janie and Jubel, a roar like a thousand lions from Africa deafened her, and the house screamed as it was ripped to shreds.

~~~~~~~

Like light years, the shrieking seemed to go on forever, but the devil cloud lasted just seconds. The air was cold, the ground wet, and the sun shone down on the toothpicks that had been trees. No birds sang, they were shocked into silence, soaked and downed, they were forced to huddle in the red mud.

Two puppies that Janie had saved from certain death when the bitch dog had died, lay as if camouflaged in the clay soil, one barely breathing, it's little tongue going in and out, begging for air. Begging for life.

The white stick house was gone as if it had never existed. As if it had never been there to shelter the mother, or her son and daughter. Feathers floated and clung to the remnants, but there were no more hens. Their naked forms were strewn along the path of the storm, along with the body of the little Jersey milk cow. She lay yards away, with flies feasting, the small things already beginning the clean-up.

The once beautiful quilt clung to the side of what was once an oak tree, the color of it indiscernible, the wool ticking sticking out of holes made by flying sticks, and shards of things unknown. Pink forms lay nearby. Twisted and torn, no longer human, they lay with their souls bared to God.

Finally, a note rang out across the skinned earth. A tiny wren sang a song of death. Of death, and too, the wren sang a farewell to the lady who'd kept the small feeder filled with the wonderful seeds all winter long. She sang good-bye, and fluffing her tiny wings to dry them out, she went into the sun. Into the warm rays to search for a new home, and live another day.

A sunshower washed down on the land as a double rainbow painted the sky across the track left by the storm ... and out in the middle of where the little Jersey cow had once grazed, lay the old green Mason jar. Unbroken, and still filled with the meticulously saved bills, its glass sides tinked as the big drops fell--telling the mother it would save her money for yet another rainy day.