The first time she heard a tornado siren, she thought it a joke. A knock-knock joke with an existential punchline.

Knock, knock.

Who's there?

Who's me? 

I was hoping you could tell me!

"Just a storm," she laughed, watching him dart to the front of the house and look out the window. "Storms where I come from are way worse than this."

"You're not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy."

"Yeah, don't remind me. O-high-o." High over what, she'd asked when they first moved here nine months ago. Just what were these people so superior about? Lake Erie?

"And another thing, I'm Toto, not Dorothy. Dorothy was always so homely. Toto — Toto had class."

That was the summer vegetables started cropping up around the house: a squishy rutabaga in the bathroom, wilted lettuce underneath the bed, some overgrown squash stashed in a chest full of winter sweaters.

The trouble, it seemed, began during Karly's commute to work, a ride that took her the better part of an hour because they lived so far from the city. First, it was the love songs on the radio. A thousand studio-glazed voices taunting her like a bad hair day. When I look in the mirror, baby, it's your love I see looking back at me. Or: If I had it to do all over again/I'd marry you over a thousand men. The songs stirred in Karly the beginning strains of self-doubt: did she and Charles have the kind of love these singers crooned and mooned about? 

Charles had never been one to elaborate on his feelings, and Karly had to admit, neither was she. She'd always imagined that their greatest emotional connection would come in the middle of a catastrophe. She envisioned a car jacking, a house fire, even a horrific beach-resort drowning. In all episodes, Charles would be the first to encounter death, to realize the gig was up, and he would look at Karly, with the full weight of what, for the most part, remained unspoken between them, in his eyes: I do love you. The different scenarios rolled in her head as she drove, the refrains of someone else's love song casting a sentimental melancholy on the possibilities.

By the time she arrived at work, she was unable to concentrate, her brain stopping and starting like a blender crushing ice, grating entire chunks of coherent thought into mere slivers to choke on.

Eventually, she began leaving her car radio off. Instead, she concentrated on the scenery, so unlike the mountains of Vermont, where she was from. Here, the land was as flat as a boring cartoon. She felt like an outsider, someone incapable of communing with the land and its inhabitants, these annoyingly friendly mid-westerners. Just what were they so happy about all the time?

One morning, traffic was at a virtual standstill, and Karly noticed a motorcycle enter the highway as she crept by an on-ramp. The rider ended up directly behind her, so close he seemed hooked to her bumper. She looked in her rearview mirror, hoping to give him a dirty look that he would see, but instead she did a double take, her heart pounding. Sure enough, it was Randy Potter, her high school sweetheart. Karly would recognize him anywhere: those long, lanky legs, short torso, and, beneath the helmet he wore, she knew there was a mop of thick hair as unruly as Randy himself. Unlike her husband, who was an assortment of itys — stability, dependability, good-for-her-ity — Randy was like her, wild and untamed. He and his careening motorcycle had introduced her to the thin line between life and death, the difference between feeling alive and simply existing. 

Every morning Karly left the house at the same time so she'd pass the on-ramp just as Randy would be entering the highway. Most of the time, her timing was right, and there he was, behind her, revving his engine and, she was certain, begging for a romp in the sack. She'd look in her rearview mirror, smile seductively and hope with a giddy, fearful heart that he'd pull up beside her, nod his head, and they'd run off to the bleachers together. By the time she arrived at work, her pulse had quickened, her eyes sparkled and certain parts of her tingled. She swept into the office, breathless but chatty, and able to work again.

One morning, Karly was late getting out of the house, and she cursed herself for not being on time. To make matters worse, traffic was gridlocked, and she impatiently beat on her steering wheel. 

Up ahead, she could see the red glow of sirens. As traffic inched its way past the accident scene, Karly looked over and was horrified to see the motorcycle on its side, crumpled like a wavy potato chip. A car, a big sedan, was a few feet away, glass from its headlights or taillights, she couldn't tell, spattered on the pavement.

She slammed on her brakes, almost causing another accident, and quickly pulled to the shoulder. She left the car running and sprinted to the scene of the accident, shaking her head no no no.

"Randy!" she screamed. 

One of the attendants came up to her, and gently held her back from getting any closer.

"Do you know this man?" he asked. Karly ignored him; she was frozen, watching helplessly as the man was carefully loaded into the ambulance. 

Miss, do you know this man

She shrugged the emergency worker off and staggered to the side of the road. 

Miss, are you all right are you all right 

It wasn't him. Karly moaned, then vomited. 

When she finally made it into work, it was almost noon and she immediately put in for a leave of absence. 

Karly had never thought of herself as the marrying type. Too cynical, too out of touch with her own emotions, too self-aware of all of the above. But then she met Charles, in a bowling alley of all places.

He was with a group of guys, all drinking beer and eating chilidogs while they waited for a lane to open up. Karly hated bowling; she was only there with a girlfriend she was visiting for the weekend. Her friend was interested in the clown shoe rental guy.

"Look at him," she gushed. "He can hold six pairs at once!"

"And all different sizes!" chirped Karly. She could never take love seriously. Her girlfriend ignored the sarcasm and wandered over to talk to shoe-boy. Karly was left standing a few feet in from the doorway, coughing through the haze of smoke and listening to bad seventies music. The Village People or something. Maybe Earth Wind and Fire. Who could remember?

When she walked over to get a glass of water, Charles was leaning against the counter. He smiled at Karly; she frowned.

"The beer's flat," he warned.

"I'm not getting beer. Thanks." She looked away.

"I am."

She turned back to him, appraised his neatly clipped hair, manicured fingernails. "You just said it was flat!"

"Did I?"

They were married a year later, at a justice of the peace in some little town in the Cascade Mountains in Washington, near Bigfoot's hometown, or so the justice of the peace joked in-between vows. They had been traveling together, across the country on a six-week jaunt in between career switches for both. The trip was Karly's idea — she was by nature a whimsical person, though often hesitant to act on it. But she trusted Charles. He seemed reliable, dependable. Anyone with hair parted that precisely was someone you could tell your darkest secrets to. Or at least want to, even if you couldn't.

"You make me laugh," he told her, and he meant it. 

"You make me ache," she replied.

They ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch and camping food for dinner, the kind that comes in bags and can be heated over a fire, or a can of sterno in case of emergency. More often than not, it was the sterno. It wasn't that effective but easier and much quicker to set up when hunger struck, which it often did in those days. 

Later, Charles proposed they move somewhere close to one of their families. 

"Family?" she blinked.

They moved to Ohio, forty-five minutes outside of Columbus, where he was from. They rarely saw his parents or his two sisters. Mostly they tended to their respective careers, his and hers; cozy, like matching terry-clothed bathrobes. He worked at a local computer company and she at a newspaper. They occasionally entertained — friends, not family, landscaped the yard on their little ranch house, painted the interior, and generally just waited for life to get better, for the big pot of chips to be cashed in. Isn't that what life was, Karly found herself wondering, more than once. One huge gambling debt that takes a lifetime to repay?

During the first week of her sabbatical, Karly lay around on the couch in her bathrobe. She had placed candles all over the house — small ones, short ones, tubby ones releasing a fabricated odor such as pine needles or ocean breezes — they were designed to heal all kinds of ailments, mostly those of the mind. These Karly liked best, and bought compulsively, sometimes even at the grocery store, though she didn't have much faith in their health claim. They were more like mental breath mints, and could only mask the stench that was her brain decaying from suburban tedium. 

She watched talk shows, injecting herself with doses of other people's dysfunction. Charles and I certainly don't have these kinds of problems, she thought smugly. But after a few days, she grew bored with the similar stories and next turned her attention to romance novels. 

These only tossed Karly into despair. 

"You've never slain a dragon for me," she complained to Charles, her voice wavering between anger and a pout. "Not even a dragonfly."

"What's for dinner?" he asked, kissing her forehead as if she were a child with a fever.

Charles' silence regarding her troubles bothered Karly, but since she didn't want to talk about it either, she felt both anger and relief. Her confusion was only made worse by his feeble attempts at help.

"Maybe it's time for that next step," he'd said, coming up from behind and sliding his arms around her as she washed dishes one night.

Karly held up a fork, pretending to inspect it. "Next step? I'm still waiting to see if the marriage is going to work out."

Charles stepped back. "It’s working right now, isn’t it?" 

She turned around and looked at him, her eyes wide and blank as china. 

"Is it?"

Not that she would admit it to Charles, but Karly supposed she wanted children — in the abstract they appealed to her: chubby cheeks, big smiles, the tickle of baby powder. But as an actuality, a probability even, the thought terrified her. Children were the final sign of domesticity — surely they would clutch at her, demand things she wasn't capable of giving, rob her of any identity she had so far managed to salvage as her own.

This, she knew, Charles would never understand. Here was a man who agreeably went by three names, encouraged it even. Charles, Charlie, Chuck. How many bales of hay could a Charlie Chuck chuck if a Charles could chuck hay? 

Pick one, any one, she'd demanded when they first met.

"They're all fine," he said resolutely. "I go by all three."

"But how will you know who you are?" Her voice was thick, slurred, but not from drink. 

"I'm Charles," he said, exasperated.

Karly had always obsessed over identity, most frequently her own. Who do you think I am? she constantly asked Charles, as if she were a riddle that, with the right answer, would be solved once and for all. Who do you think you married, anyway? And then, lately, there were the really bad nights, when she tossed and turned, banged on her pillow with a skinny fist and threw the blanket off her heated body, only to clamor for it in the next instant. All the while, Charles snored peacefully beside her, leaving Karly to wonder alone, in a mania compounded by sleep deprivation, Who are we, this us? 

After the idea of children failed to motivate Karly, Charles next suggested to his exhausted wife that she try gardening.

"What you need is a project," he said knowingly, as though all along he'd held the answers to her mental torment and was playing them like a poker hand.

Karly looked at him crossly. "Who do I look like, Martha Stewart?" she asked, exasperated. But the next morning, after he'd left for work, she showered, dressed, and made a trip to the local greenhouse, where she spent hours picking out, with the kindly help of a patient salesperson, seeds, transplants, fertilizers and tools. When Charles came home that evening, she had a flush in her eyes and an earthy stain on her skin.

"I thought you weren't interested in gardening," he said, confused. 

Karly narrowed her eyes. "You don't even know me anymore."

After she took up gardening, her newly discovered green thumb at last gave Karly the exhaustion she needed to turn off her brain and sleep at night. She spent hour after hour of quiet mornings and afternoons digging, planting, hoeing, weeding, and watering. Slowly, the love songs, Randy, and the thought of children were laid to rest in the freshly overturned earth.

Her two-week sabbatical slowly stretched into three months. Karly was pretty certain she didn’t have a job to return to, though she hadn't said anything to Charles. The garden, meanwhile, began taking over the entire backyard. What started as a small 4" x 4" plot ended up a mini city of vegetables, complete with smooth roads, intersections, and carefully organized clusters of sameness mixed with variety. Each night, Karly prepared a different meal made from her labor, and she and Charles would sit down to eat, pretending theirs was a normal household, their denial sitting between them like a rude stranger that Karly unconsciously tried to please through her newfound talents.

"Saffron Risotto Timbales," she'd say, setting down a soupy dish in front of Charles. 

"And what is that?" 

"Tomatoes and rice."

"Food for the brain," he joked.

One night, Karly proudly presented Charles with a new dish. ''I've been working on this all day," she announced. She sounded tired but excited. She hovered about, anxiously awaiting his reaction.

"Honey, this is great! What's in it?" he asked, reaching for his second bite.

Karly beamed. "Oh, it's nothing special. A little parmesan, some mozzarella, egg, oregano, cilantro, zucchini, squash. Oh, and remember that really big eggplant, the loner? Well, I finally pulled him . . ." Her voice suddenly trailed off, and she stared at the large forkful nearing Charles' eager mouth. She looked at her husband as if seeing him for the first time. He suddenly seemed, well, gluttonous. 

Who was this man she'd married? Who was he that he could sit at this table and eat her vegetables so unassumingly? 

She shot her hand out and grabbed his arm.

"Don't!" 

"Don't what? I told you, honey, this is delicious."

"Charles." She meant it as a command, but it came out weakly. 

"Karly, what's wrong?"

He still had food in his mouth — she could see it trapped, unrecognizable, as he talked. She wasn't hearing anything he said; could only stare at him blankly, unseeing. 

Miss, do you know this man?

Karly snapped to, as if waking from a dream. She pushed herself away from the table. "I-I've got to go lie down."

Are you all right?

Charles followed her into their bedroom. She lay down on the bed, her back to him.

"Karly?"

She struggled to speak, and Charles had to lean close to hear her.

"I-I can't . . ."

"What —?"

"—I'm the one who planted them in the first place." She turned to him, her face splotchy red. "And then—then I just kill them!"

Charles sat back, and she could see he was stunned. But why? It was obvious, so easy. It had been there all along. Her hard work, the fruits of her labor. Chopped up into a thousand pieces, a casserole of greed and destruction. 

"Karly," he whispered, as if she were a wart he'd just discovered. Then he got up and left the room, closing the door softly behind him.

Karly rolled over and buried her face in her pillow. "I thought I made you laugh," she moaned, her voice thick and spongy, like mold. 

After that night, Karly began eating nothing but crackers and cheese sandwiches, while Charles picked up fast food on the way home from work that he ate in the car. And meanwhile, the spared vegetables piled up: a stack of tomatoes by the sink, beans lovingly heaped in a corner, onions flowing out of a cardboard box kept next to the back door. After a while the food began rotting, and Charles would quietly slip the stinking vegetables into the garbage when Karly wasn't around, toting the bag secretly to the curb. 

The day of the tornado, they had been lounging; it was a Saturday. While he napped, she read. While he puzzled out a crossword, she bathed after a morning in the garden. 

"What's going on?" she called irritably, stepping out of the tub when the siren pitched its first wail. 

"Tornado," Charles said, his voice muffled through the door. 

"Oh, good. I thought it was the beginning of World War Three." Karly came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, and watched, amused, as Charles raced around the house, looking out the back windows, then the front ones. 

"Your problem is, you take yourself too seriously," she said, dropping her towel. "Relax."

He stopped his pacing, looked at her with his eyebrows raised. "Maybe you should take yourself a little more seriously." 

"What's that supposed to mean?" But he'd already left the room. Karly followed, her naked body dripping water as she went. 

He was in the kitchen, pacing.

"We have to figure out a safe place to go."

"What's the big deal?"

Charles ignored his wife. Outside, the massive oak tree in the back yard swayed, the tips of its branches fingernails against a chalkboard sky. Karly leaned coolly against the counter, near a pile of cabbages. She absently toyed with the soggy outer leaves of a smaller one, noticing with interest its many brown spots. She made a mental note to get some more fertilizer.

"If you ask me, the odds of this thing actually hitting us seems pretty slim," she said, her eyes still on the cabbage.

Charles stopped, looked at his wife as if seeing her for the first time. 

"Put some clothes on," he said.

"Why don't you take yours off instead?" she retorted.

She'd barely spoken the words before Charles pounced across the room; it seemed to her a blur of one giant leap and there he was, his face colored an uncharacteristic red, his lips snarled. He slammed his hands down on the counter; the dishes in the cabinet rattled and her heart jumped. 

"Would that make you happy, Karly? If I took my clothes off? Is that all it takes to make you happy?"

Karly balked. She wasn't used to anger in Charles, and it felt like wearing a sweater that was too small, its sleeves pressed tight against her wrists. She stood, frozen by her husband's unexpected outburst. Somewhere, in the back of her mind, she thought, so here we are, but she knew it was too late.

"It'd be a start," she said defiantly.

He was already unbuttoning his shirt, his hands moving in clumsy, angry jerks. Karly reached forward to unzip his pants, laughing, but he swatted her hands away.

"Stop it, Karly!" With one swift yank, his pants dropped to the floor. Charles then flexed the waistband of his boxer shorts with a dramatic flair, pulled them down and stepped out of them. 

"Now what," he demanded, arms folded across his bare chest. 

Suddenly the kitchen window rattled in its frame; the lights flickered, once, twice, then the room went dark. They stood on opposite sides of the room, he a rigid silhouette in front of the window, she soft as a biscuit, all but invisible in the darkness. 

Karly stood in the dim light, absorbed in the memory of just how easily and without comment Charles had pushed her hands away. After a moment, she bent over and silently picked his clothes up off the floor, carefully inspecting each wrinkle and button as though they were a carton of eggs. Only she was the one dented, her epicenter cracked in concentric, equally bruised circles. She carefully folded his pants, his shirt, even his boxer shorts, and gently placed them on the counter. 

"Now what," she repeated in a tired whisper, turning to face Charles. But instead of him, she now saw the storm outside the window: the earlier green haze had given way to complete blackness, and even though it was still summer, leaves swirled through the air as if it were autumn. But it was the noise that most alarmed Karly, a distant rumble that grew louder with each passing moment. She had grown up near train tracks, and the thundering noise reminded her of those nights when she had lain awake, waiting for that last car to pass. Only this was much louder. She ran to the window, pressed her face against the trembling glass. That's when she saw it — the garden. Caught in the crosswinds of the storm, her vegetables were tossing about like toys in the hands of an impatient child.

Wordlessly, Karly turned to Charles, her face stricken. 

But he only shrugged his shoulders and looked away. 

With a cry, Karly ran out the back door and sprinted across the yard, forgetting that she was naked. Lightening struck in the not-too-far distance, but she paid no attention. The rain had started, and it poured down, soaking her in only a few seconds. It was a freakish rain, falling from the sky horizontally — mother nature's disclaimer for her impending destruction: this is not of me. Karly raced against the insistent and unyielding pull of the wind; it yanked at her hair, her eyes, her toenails. Her garden seemed miles away, unreachable to even her. But she could hear the stalks of corn rustling like parchment, tomatoes toppling to the ground, zucchini splitting in two.

Suddenly there was a sharp gust of wind, different from the others, and Karly felt paper-thin, like a frog flattened by an untimely tire. She imagined herself floating through the darkened sky: saw herself, unclothed and suddenly vulnerable; her house, a house that looked like all others in the neighborhood, places that incubated whole, plastic lives; her garden, the vegetables upturned and lying in a sad, comical heap. The rows and rows of order she had so painstakingly created, the hours of weeding, hoeing, fertilizing, watering, all for nothing. All of it destroyed, flattened as though it had never existed in the first place.

Then she saw him. Charles stood on the ground, wearing a coat but no shoes. His arms were outstretched and his face was searching. Had he been there all along, Karly wondered, but with a stranger's curiosity. Is that what love was — someone looking for you when you were lost? The thought made her instantly heavy, as though sand now filled her aching joints and she needed to look for a good spot to land.