Ilya

there's nothing there

♡

Originally published in The 13th Floor Magazine, University of Nebraska at Omaha, Issue Spring 2026

Another Storm in Nebraska

It was always yellowish-gray before the storm came. The open prairie, the family farm, the storm cellar none of it would protect me.

Humidity hung in the air thick with the weight of tension.

My mom nailed a mirror to the barn wall that never showed my face right, warped by years of summer like it couldn’t remember what I looked like before the sirens started.

The man on the weather radio told us to take shelter, but we never listened.

Dad sat on the porch with a beer. Mom hummed in the kitchen.

It was like a second religion to watch the world fall apart from our little town in the plains.

It crawled up the old country roads, ripping through corn and soy. Leaving scars across the soft dirt with the slow pleasure of a serial killer.

Before the sirens, I climbed the ladder in the barn and sat in the dust-covered attic, thick as ash, next to my mom’s wedding dress.

It lay on the wooden floor like a corpse.

She once told me: If I had a daughter, I could’ve altered it for her.

But I still imagined wearing it.

The wind came first; it always did. It could peel a rotted porch off like skin.

The funnel reached down behind a veil of rain, like God dragging his finger across the Earth, reminding us that he can kill.

They say a tornado sounds like a train.

That day, it sounded like my father’s voice breaking behind the screen door.

The next day, we found out it leveled Mr. Stout’s farm, a few miles north, flattened the red barn where I kissed his son, Daniel, the summer we turned seventeen.

The town called it God’s judgment. I called it another storm.