A story about... A Storm © 2000 Marg Frey, Bryce Graves-Hurst, Nahoya, Christine Schwab	NAHOYA	MARG	BRYCE & CHRISTINE
				CHRISTINE & BRYCE
			BRYCE	MARG & CHRISTINE
				CHRISTINE & MARG
			CHRISTINE	MARG & BRYCE
				BRYCE & MARG

***

"I'm telling you, we're missing something really significant here. Look at this pattern of destruction! Have you ever seen anything so completely thorough? It's like this storm has a glacier complex or something! And if we keep looking at it the old way, we're doomed!"

I looked around the room desperately, hoping for some gleam of sympathy in a coworker's eye. Hoping in vain, I might add. As an English major with a philosophy minor, I'm always the odd man out here at the Weather Channel. My boss claims he was just trying to broaden the perspective of the organization when he hired me--the only nonmeteorologist in the office. So, yes, I wrote my master's thesis on Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud," but you can't really call that training. Or even a meteorology bent. But the humanities job market was so miserable that I was thrilled to find someone who would hire me, even outside my actual field.

I finally caught an eye. Old man Thompson, the announcer who had been here for twenty years, now. He got into television before you needed a communications degree to do this kind of thing. He didn't like me. He seemed to get annoyed every time I used an SAT word. "Listen, Chucky," he began, "I'm really not sure what your point is. We've told everyone it's a killer. We've announced where it's headed. Your rambling on excitedly that we 'don't understand its true nature' is getting on my nerves. What the hell is it you think we do here, anyway." He left the lounge, missing a garbage can with a mangled styrofoam cup on his way out. It was picked up by a young kid from meteorology on his way in.

His face was white. He was one of the people who had been here for several days tracking the storm. He looked absently at the floor, then at the cup in his hand. Then he cleared his throat said quietly to noone in particular, "It's, um, on its way here."