Photo by Jesse Gardner on Unsplash
At two years old my brother began to create weather. He could produce snowstorms or thunderclouds above his head and laugh as if it was completely natural. The first time was in the middle of August. It was so hot outside that the A/C unit in our bedroom window hummed all day and blew out air that had a certain artificial smell to it. He was playing in his little pin with these plastic, colorful balls. As he played, his curly hair became frizzy from the heat and almost stood directly up on his head. His hair was a genetic mystery. Our mother, me, our distant relatives we only saw on the holidays, no one had that hair. Our mother didn’t know what to do with it and combing only made it stick up and frizz. So, most of the time, his hair looked like a little halo around him.
I had been playing with my dollhouse, a beautiful wooden Victorian. Even though it was a toy, I hardly had fun with it. I spent hours redecorating the furniture inside while trying not to touch anything, in fear of destroying something with the oils on my hands. This day is when it first happened. I heard Ben start laughing. Above him was a little storm cloud, heavy like the ones outside when it is about to rain. A few raindrops were falling on his head, one by one, onto his little curls.
“Sissy!” he called out to me. This was one of the first words he learned and during this time he repeated it over and over.
“Ben?” I thought maybe I was dreaming because I couldn’t move. It was like in those nightmares where I couldn’t speak. I’d open my mouth and strain and no noise would come out right when I had something important to say.
“Look!” he said, another word he knew. His chubby middle finger, the one he used to point with until he was corrected in school, was raised in the air. His big eyes were looking up at the cloud that was getting darker and darker, the raindrops fell more steadily. The room started to smell of rain, like the world did before a thunderstorm when everything got quiet and waited for it to start.
“What are you doing?” I still had the king-sized doll bed in my hand. I had been busy redecorating the house, moving the master bedroom downstairs and the office upstairs. The dollhouse was huge, bigger than our tiny rental where Ben and I shared a room.
“Sissy! Raining!”
“Are you doing that, Ben?” His curls were starting to get soaked and his little play pin went pitter patter as the raindrops fell heavier.
“Cold!” Ben cried out, turning his head to me with a terrified expression on his face. “Sissy! Cold!”
I was frozen in place, my eyes still fixated on the cloud above him. He started crying then and as he did, the rain fell heavier. As his screams turned to wails and the hot tears came, the cloud grew and grew until it filled up the whole room. It started to rain on everything, soaking our carpet, the dresser with all my clothes, my bed and his crib, and my doll house.
“Ben!” I screamed, which scared him more. “Stop it!”
“Cold!” I thought for a moment that the world might be ending. We were raised Catholic and I knew about the end of the world and Jesus’s return. Was this how the great flood started? Was my little brother possessed? Our mother came in then and screamed something, but I couldn’t hear her over the growing thunderstorm and Ben’s crying. I watched as my beautiful dollhouse became soaked, the little furniture tipping over and rain droplets falling down the sides on the plastic windows. I swore I saw the expression on my dolls faces turn to that of terror, but I wasn’t sure.
After that day, our mother took Ben to the priest. Father Gene took them to the clergy office in a small space behind the tabernacle where the altar boys kept their robes. I was ten and hadn’t hit my growth spurt yet, so my feet didn’t quite reach the ground when I sat in a pew waiting. Church on a weekday was scary. It was quiet and every move I made echoed, bouncing off the high walls. The light that came through the stained-glass windows illuminated the dust floating through the air. The air conditioning was loud and sounded like a monster, kicking on every few minutes. As I waited, I played with my hands, digging at the skin around my nails. When they come back out, Father Gene smiled at me. He was just in his black shirt and pants, with the white collar of a priest. He looked like any man and it was startling to me, to see him out of his colorful robes. My mother was quiet as we drove home. I guess she didn’t find her answers there. But at least Ben wasn’t possessed, I remember thinking, this wasn’t something evil.
*
As the weeks went on, I started to have nightmares of the devil living in our basement. I was in the middle of my 1st communion, where I was going to classes twice a week at the church and being told if I didn’t repent, I’d go to hell and burn for all eternity. There are some things a kid just should not have to worry about. That being one of them. Anyways, I was also developing an anxiety disorder and my mother didn’t believe in therapists, at least for me. As Ben was creating bouts of weather above his head, I was either not sleeping at all or waking up screaming from a nightmare with some variation of the devil taunting me from our basement steps or bloody Jesus on the cross and so on. My mother was in a perpetual state of having migraines and so we were left on our own. I knew I couldn’t tell anyone about Ben, not even my classmates in Sunday school or Father Gene. They all said tarot cards were witchcraft and that believing in magic was the devil’s work, so how was I supposed to explain to anyone that my little brother could create weather? How could I say that he wasn’t evil, and I was more scared of the pictures of Jesus they gave us on prayer cards than I was of his thunderstorms.
One of the nights I woke up crying from a dream that the devil had tied up the characters from my favorite Disney movie in our basement. In the dream I was on the top of our carpeted steps, looking down as he danced around. The wood paneling of the walls was replaced by large, fluorescent red lights. The devil looked just like the cartoons they’d show in Sunday school, explaining that Satan was a fallen angel and is full of hatred for God and that the best way to get back to his creator is take our souls for eternity. I always thought the story sounded like something from a storybook.
“Sissy!” Ben called out to me as I sat up in my bed, holding the blankets around me after I had woken up. He was standing up in his crib, his hair matted on one side.
“I’m sorry I woke you up, Ben.” I got up and ran to turn our bedroom light on. He reached his little hands out to me, a motion meaning he wanted to be held. I took him in my arms and bounced him up and down, steadying myself. I was not in hell and hell was not in my basement. “I had a bad dream.”
“Look.” He tilted his head back, so he was looking up at our ceiling. “Snow!”
I tilt my head back too and see a white cloud enveloping our room. With it came a cold, like we were standing in our freezer, and one by one little snowflakes fell around us. My dollhouse, already destroyed by the thunderstorm he created before, started to be covered in white. It looked like Christmastime and I imagined my dolls inside, running over to look outside at the snow.
“How are you doing this?” I continued to bounce him. He reached his arms up in the air and laughed.
“I want down.” He threw himself on the ground once I put him down. Not in an angry way, but with the grace of a toddler learning to walk and hold his body up. He pointed at me with his middle finger. “Sissy like snow.”
I laid down on the floor by him, looking up at the growing cloud. The snow began to cover us. Ben started to shiver next to me and I pulled him close, stroking his curls down with my fingers. “I do like snow, Ben. Thank you.”
We fell asleep like that and woke up to our mother screaming and three inches of snow in our bedroom. She took him back to Father Gene and in Sunday school we learned about Jonah and the whale. How was swallowed up whole but lived because he trusted in God and God saved him.
*
On the night after my first communion, it happened again. We didn’t have a lot of money to throw a party with expensive rosaries as gifts, but mother made me spaghetti and bought me a prayer card with Jesus smiling on it. It was the first time I had ever seen the guy smile. In this image, he was happy and reminded me of Father Gene. Just a man out of his colorful robes. After we ate our spaghetti, our mother laid down because of a migraine. She had been having them more and more frequently, from stress. I was wiping Ben’s mouth with a washrag because his lips and chin were covered with store bought pasta sauce. I felt like a big deal that night. I thought I could feel Jesus inside me, from eating the host and drinking the wine. It was like having an imaginary friend. It made caring for Ben less lonely. But I was also incredibly tired from weeks of nightmares and being in constant fear of the devil. My mother thought about taking me to Father Gene too, but I think she was too embarrassed to have two kids with religious issues.
“You have so much on your face.” I said to Ben as I finished wiping the sauce away and threw the dishrag in the sink. I took him from his highchair and held him close to me, thinking of smiling Jesus and the devil in our basement.
“Sissy!” Ben looked up and laughed, the curls on his head were covered in snow. Little flakes of all sizes fell on us, covering the kitchen tile and counters. He stuck out his tongue to catch them in his mouth. I don’t think Ben knew what he was doing or how he did it. To him, it was just as strange. Or maybe it wasn’t strange at all. At only two, maybe this is how he thought the world worked. Snowstorms were created in kitchens, rainstorms in bedrooms.
“Look!” he laughed and pointed to a snowflake that had fallen on my nose, melting against my skin. We stayed there for a while, until the entire room was coated in snow. Then, as we began to shiver, I took him into my arms and tried to warm him up.
Our mother would wake up and discover the snow. She’d get mad at us and have another migraine. I’d stay up cleaning the kitchen and she’d take Ben back to the priest, to a therapist, to a doctor, to some con artist who told her he was apart of the occult and that this was a normal thing. She would never understand.
As Ben grew older, he learned how to control his power and kept it secret. It was only between us. In church one Sunday, when our mother was kneeling with her eyes closed trying to pray away the things about us she couldn’t understand, he pointed to the ceiling where a little cloud was forming. Right under the painting of angels and God creating man. We laughed quietly as little droplets of rain fell on the crowd below and watched as a few of their heads would look up, only never notice what was happening.
Michelle Bellman has been published in Scapegoat Review, Passengers Journal, Running Wild Press, Flash Fiction Online, and several other journals. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She received her MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from Bowling Green State University in 2021. She works as an Adjunct Professor at Bowling Green State University and Ohio Northern University. She is originally from Wapakoneta, Ohio and currently lives in Bowling Green, Ohio with her four parakeets.