I am a young child on a beach in Galveston with my family. I’m playing in the sand when my mom points at the horizon.
“Look! Waterspouts!”
I scramble to my feet and stand next to mom, dad, my older sister as we watch, hypnotized, as another waterspout reaches a tendril down from the sky to touch the water. Then another. Then another.
“What’s a waterspout?” I ask.
Mom replies: “It’s a tornado over the ocean.”
Me, suddenly terrified: “THOSE ARE TORNADOS?!”
“Yep,” my sister says.
“Shouldn’t we run?” I ask, near panic.
Dad, in a slow Texas drawl (he is not Texan): “Son, if a tornado wants ya, it’ll git ya. Ya can’t run from those.”
Mom hits him in the shoulder, hard, while I start wailing like a tornado siren.
watching an itsy bitsy spider climb up one of those things
