Hurricane

This is a fictional short story about a girl and her brother who lived through an aggressive hurricane.

I always knew that our family lived in danger of hurricanes. When you live at the beach, it's just part of life. I hadn't actually been in one until this one, so I was never really worried. We first heard about it on the radio. The weather man called it Hurricane Dennis, and mentioned that it was headed for the southeast corner of North America. Florida, where we lived, wasn't really in danger. I was 16 at the time, and I had one brother. He was 12. We started hearing more and more about Hurricane Dennis on the radio, and how it was getting up to 130 mile per hour. Then we heard that it hit Cuba and was quickly coming up the coast but may turn west. At first my mom wasn't worried about it hitting Key West, but I was. I had a gut feeling that it would hit our city. The weather man slowly started to show the concern that it would hit the bottom edge of Florida. And in the end, yeah, it did.

The weather man told us that last minute that Hurricane Dennis was veering west on the Gulf of Mexico towards Alabama. I believed him, my family believed him, and everyone I knew believed the weather channel. But it was a mistake. A BIG mistake.

It started with a little bit of rain, and everyone thought it was just side effects, and yep. So did the weather man. We had two days of misty rain and then it stopped. But the next day, it poured, the electricity went out, and it was super windy. We couldn't turn on our TV or our radio, and I was certain that the weather channel was wrong about everything, and that Hurricane Dennis was right over our heads.

The next day it rained even harder, but my mom and dad went to work and were oblivious to their surroundings. Almost no one was evacuating, because they all believed it would blow over really quickly like the last weather report said. But could no one see for themselves? We were obviously in the middle of a hurricane, and at this point, it was too late to get out. That day school was canceled for my brother and I, so we basically just sat at home all day with the wind whirling around and the raindrops banging against the windows. But our parents still weren't home when we heard a big crash in the kitchen. A branch had fallen and broken one of the kitchen windows, and rain was pouring through into the house.

"Go to the basement and grab Dads hammer, some nails, and any wood you can find. Quickly!" I told my brother Rob. He went quickly enough, but by the time he had hauled everything I asked for upstairs there was water all over the kitchen despite my efforts to block the window. Rob had found some random pieces of ply wood that wouldn't fit the window, so I had to nail three pieces of wood around the window before it was covered, and then to be even more safe I taped one of our heavy duty black trash bags on top of that. I did it to our other kitchen window too. Rob mentioned that he was starting to feel kind of claustrophobic, and I completely agreed with him, but what can you do, right?

When my mom got home that night, we showed her what had happened and she got scared. The next day she didn't go to work, but Dad did. The weather was worse that day, but the next day, it looked as if it were clearing up, so my parents left us alone again, and went to work. School was out all week, and apparently so was the electricity. My phone was dead and my Mom had taken the big battery pack to work with her, so Rob and I Rob and I had to come up with something useful to do. The "good" weather didn't last for long. The rain got worse, and I hadn't noticed this before, but the yard was full of water. And so was the street, and our neighbors yard, and everywhere I looked, there was water. That day the water level rose to our front stoop, which has stairs leading up to it, and we constantly heard branches falling onto our roof. Two more windows broke that day, and there was a leak in the roof over the living room, because a large log had fallen on top of it. My parents came home really late, apparently there was a problem at work, (they both worked for the same company) and were shocked at the water level.

The next day my parents didn't go to work, but they had to run errands. There was too much water everywhere to drive, but the local grocery was walkable and luckily had a few items left in it. My dad went to the hardware store to get more plywood, which also was walkable from our house. It had stopped raining for the morning, but 30 minutes after our parents left, it was pouring. The wind started to pick up speed, the back door fell off the hinge, and water was seeping in under the front door. My parents had been gone for three hours and Rob and i were starting to get worried. It was raining branches, literally, so we decided they must have stayed in the store for safety until things cleared up. Rob and I spent all day moving everything nice off the floor, and a lot of stuff upstairs. The water on the first floor was now really bad ----- to the middle of our calves, and surprisingly wasn't in the basement. But as soon as the water was high enough, it trickled under the door to the basement down the stairs, and the basement was completely flooded. Rob and I finished hauling everything we needed upstairs, including a large supply of food and water. Our parents never came home that day, and we went to bed very late.

It was still pouring when we woke up, and the water had risen. There were leaks in the roof all over, and in my parents room there was a dent in the roof and the high rise window had broken. Rob and I couldn't fix that, so we plastered trash bags all around the room. The glass in the front door broke, and so did the storm door in front of the regular door. We had run out of wood, so water was gushing in through all the doors and windows we hadn't covered up. Rob and I had made boxes full of things from our rooms we could move and we cared about, then placed them in the attic. My parents still weren't home, and it was STILL pouring, so we decided to go downstairs, and look outside from the front door. We opened the front door, and the wind hit Rob, and he fell back into the water. I looked out onto our street, and saw an alligator swimming down the road! There were two small kittens in a tree outside our house meowing, and my heart melted. Even after seeing that alligator, I had to save them. I put on my boots, went outside, climbed the tree and got them out to bring them inside. Rob and I dried the kittens off, and gave them some of our food.

Conditions only got worse. The walls on the first floor looked like they were wearing down, and I couldn't imagine what the basement was like. The water rose up to the fith stair, so Rob and I and the kittens, were stuck upstairs. We named the kittens Hope and RoJi. RoJi may be a weird name, but it's Jillian and Rob kind of together. I'm Jillian. All the windows in the house were broken, we had no back door, only part of the front door, our house was flooded almost to the second floor, there were several dents in the roof, so we thought it would only get better from there, but we were wrong. The palm trees in our yard were bending in all different directions, and our oak tree was leaning over our house. That day, the oak tree fell on top of our house, and crushed the living room, our parents room, the upstairs bathroom, the kitchen, and the dining room. We felt lucky to be alive. A palm tree fell on my mothers car, and parts of our house were floating around.

It wasn't until a couple days later that it stopped raining. There was a thin layer of water upstairs, and our house was pretty much destroyed. Rob and I were starving, very dirty, and missing our parents. We had put all the small stuff in our rooms in the attic, and some of the big stuff by then, but that was barely anything. We heard shouting outside, so we ran to my window, and right below us, there was a boat with some police and my parents in it.

"We're up here Dad!" I shouted. Dad and Mom looked up and saw us, and they were so relieved. It took over a week for the water to drain, but that didn't matter, because we weren't there to see it ----- we left to go stay with my moms friends in North Carolina until we could rent a house for ourselves. We had very few things to call ours, but it all worked out. My parents later told us the reason they didn't come home that day. They hadn't come home because it was raining really hard when they left the stores, and then the wind started to pick up, and they become stranded. They found each other, and ate the food my mom had bought, but they couldn't find our house because the water was so high, so the lived in a tent on the a roof of a store until the police found them.

We got to keep Hope and RoJi as family pets, and we moved to Indiana, and I never had to experience a natural disaster again.