Devil Wind
Blending childhood memory, folklore, and menace, Devil Wind transforms a Santa Ana windstorm into something mythic and terrifying. It was published in Crack the Spine Literary Magazine.
Type – flash fiction
Publication / Venue – Crack the Spine Literary Magazine
Publisher – Crack the Spine Literary Magazine
Publication date – 2019
Format(s) – online
Available at – Crack the Spine Literary Magazine (via Lucid Press)
About this work – Set in the desert during a fierce Santa Ana windstorm, this flash fiction blends childhood memory, folklore, and menace. Through a child’s eyes, ordinary weather becomes mythic, revealing both the terror and strange beauty of the natural world.
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Evening shouldn’t be this warm.
Santa Ana. That man on the television with the wobbling chin. He says you should say the middle ‘a.’ “Some people,” he says, “are just too lazy to say the middle a.” Test it on your tongue and imagine a wind named after a saint. No. Mama says don’t listen to him with his fancy words. It was the people named the wind Santana. This wind is named for the devil.
The sun comes up dirty when Santana rolls through. The hairs prickle up from my head. Papa scoots his socks across the carpet and a spark jumps from his finger to my nose. “Static electricity,” he says. But then he has to go help out at the dairy.
We’re shut inside. Mama mutters, “Those precious cows aren’t even his.”
She squeezes my shoulder and tells me about the strong man who thought he could stop the wind. He climbed the cliff wall, hugging cold rock until he hauled himself over the edge and stood panting on the bare mesa. He stared straight into the dark eyes of the wind eagle. Her claws clutched the edge of a massive nest in the topmost branch of a dying tree. When she flapped her wings the wind snapped hair into his eyes. Tears cooled his temples. His kerchief tugged loose and flew away. The snaps of his shirt tore open one by one until it, too, sailed away, sleeves waving. With a gasp he landed on his back and his pants stole out from underneath. They, too, took flight. Socks and shoes dribbled along behind. He lost his hair and eyebrows strand by strand. He lies there now. Prone. Clinging to the base of that dying tree.
You don’t close drapes against Santana. Better to watch the desert unhinged. Tumbleweeds bound in elegant arcs. A rusty slab of corrugated tin revolves in the air high above the barn. Dust devils twirl through the fields. Little tornadoes sucking water from crops. An invisible hand rips out our mulberry tree. Roots dangle in the desiccated air.
Fire to the West. Smoke erases the sun.
Santana’s churning. Get ready for a night of howls and whispers. Walls shudder in the dark; beams moan. Fingers of dust sneak under the doors. A window cracks. Coyote howls. Mama says no sleep for the wicked.
When sun finally rises the earth so still and the air so clear. Colors hurt your eyes—red sand, purple mountains, sapphire sky pierced in the west by leftover stars.
A chain saw slices the faraway quiet and Mama snores on the sofa.
I slip outside and down the path to the corral. Trash huddles in the bottlebrush: plastic bags, baling wire, a Barbie doll with no clothes at all.
I throw some hay to my hungry little mare hunkered there behind the wood pile, black tail snug against her chestnut rump. Her eyes swollen shut leaking sludge. She smells me and nickers but she can’t see
all those stiff black birds scattered across the field.
