The baby was crying.

Her mother, blearily, sleepily, padded over to the child’s cradle. The floor was cold against her feet and a winter rain beat down outside, making the air wet and clammy. She pulled the crying infant up into her arms for a feeding.

In the bed behind them, her husband stirred.

“Go back to sleep, dear.”

“No, it’s fine. I’ll just get an early start.” He swung his feet over the edge of the bed and hissed as they made contact with the cold wood.

Pulling on his trousers, he stepped over to the window of their second floor apartment and looked out into the street below. “Quite a torrent. Sky’s black as pitch.”

From the roof, an irregular thumping noise echoed down. His wife looked at him quizzically. “Hail? At this time of year? How peculiar.” She said.

“Yes, indeed.” He responded, squinting out the window. The rain was starting to slack, but there was something strange happening down in the street.

The water was slithering.

“Darling,” he said. “This is most unusual, but it appears to have been raining snakes.”

“Strange.” Shrugged his wife, nonplussed. “I always thought the apocalypse would come on a Wednesday.”

Memphis Note
On December 15th of 1877, it was reported by the Memphis Appeal to have, in fact, rained snakes on the unsuspected populace of Vance Avenue. They were a mix of black and brown, most being less than a foot long. Apparently a few were captured and brought in to the newspaper as evidence. Thankfully, this was not a sign of the apocalypse. Or maybe it was, and it is just a very, very slow one.

Charles and his kid brother weren’t scared of the storm. They knew it was just wind and rain and noise, like a little dog barking its head off from behind a fence.

While all the other kids at Saint Peter’s orphanage cowered in their bunks, he and his brother had free run over all the best toys in the playroom. It was the only thing that made up for being cooped up inside while it poured.

But as they rounded the corner into the play room, they were too late.

The five Insenotti sisters had already claimed the playroom for their own. The sisters said they were descended from Italian nobility, and lorded over the rest of the orphans enough that some kids believed them.

Leo, never one for subtlety, stomped forward and demanded the girls leave.

The eldest Insenott sister stood up from the floor, towering over the brothers. Charles heard Leo gulp.

“Beat it, peasant,” she growled “And maybe, I won’t crack your head like eggs for an omelette!”

Leo looked back at Charles and mouthed “A what?”, but Charles was equally baffled and just shrugged awkwardly. They had no idea what an omelette was, but it sounded painful.

Memphis Note
For over a hundred years Saint Peter’s orphanage was a bastion of safety for wayward and abandoned children in Memphis. The orphanage was part of Saint Peter’s church, whose nuns stayed to treat the sick during the Yellow Fever epidemic. The church is still open, although the orphanage has been moved to a third party.

The storm had ripped through the city. Trees were down, power lines strewn across the ground like spaghetti, roofs, if they were missing, could probably be found a block or two away. Near as anyone could tell, the whole city had gone dark in the storm’s furious wake.

My father immediately organized a round-the-clock neighborhood watch. Drafting my brothers and I, as well as our rather militant neighbor and his massive pickup truck.

The truck was used as a make-shift roadblock into our neighborhood, with a fallen oak blocking the other street in. Camping equipment was pulled out of storage, and in no time, there was an outpost in the middle of our street.

A cooler of beer followed shortly. Then some curious neighbors, and then their beer and ice from rapidly warming fridges. Grills were wheeled out from backyards, charcoal fires making the summer night even hotter.

I grew up running through the yards of some of these people, yet this was the first time I’d spoken to them.

And as my younger brothers ran around zapping each other with barcode scanners they’d scrounged from the militant neighbor’s things, I almost felt thankful for the storm.

Memphis Note
Hurricane Elvis is what they called it. If you ask anyone who’s lived here their whole lives, they’ll tell you it was probably the worst storm they can ever remember. Parts of the city were without power for days.

They called all of the first, second and third graders into the hall and made us stand in lines. Outside, it was black as night and the storm winds buffeted the cheap plastic panes in the windows. The teachers were using their very quiet, very stern voices, the ones that scared us even more than their yelling voices.

When we were all arranged and heads had been counted, we marched down the hall, out through a breezeway that was a cacophony from my nightmares, and into the old red brick and tile middle school.

Safely inside, we lined up again. This time against lockers taller than we were. I was at one end of my line. Being both the tallest and having a last name that started with a W, I was used to this sort of thing.

But, as they told us to kneel down, with our hands crossed over the back of our heads, facing the lockers, I wasn’t used to the eighth graders that lined up next to me.

Or the teenage girl, bigger than I in every way, crying and sweating. The liquid pooling on the floor under her head. This was all new to me.

Memphis Note
This one is straight biographical. The school in question is Holy Rosary, where I attended for first through eighth grade. For a while, I was petrified of storms. I’m fine with them now, even enjoy them. Especially the wind beforehand.