The Storm Giants Read Free Page B

The stigmata of terminal illness obscured the clear features he remembered from childhood, but blurred hints of her old beauty still remained.
    For she had been a great beauty, a woman all the men hovered over when she performed. Bambi, that was her stage name. Yes: Bambi was the name Everett would focus on, flashing back to the day she tried to save him from the storm giants.
    It happened when Everett was very little, while they were living in Hayward on ‘A’ Street in a Mexican neighborhood. They moved around a lot, often to ‘hoods where they were pretty much the only Caucasian family on the block.
    T hey were what some called ‘white trash,’ though Everett never heard that term until he was a teenager. He hurt the guy who first directed that phrase in his direction; hurt him pretty bad.
    It was one of the first times he’d realized his abilities. The guy was adult and much bigger. It should have been a blowout for him to put Everett on the ground and monkey stomp his face again and again and again, instead of the other way around.
    As a kid , Everett stood out from his black and brown play mates like a little Nordic thumb, being the only one in the clique with blue eyes and a tow head of thick red hair. The kids were too young to have been fully indoctrinated by racism, and ran in a screaming pack from dawn till dusk, hitting up one mom after another for food between bouts of mischief. PB & J tasted pretty good on home made corn tortillas, and Everett still had a hankering for it that way when he remembered to eat at all.
    The day the storm g iants first came to him, Everett was playing in a vacant lot down the street from the house, rolling his beat up toy Tonka tanker truck in the dirt.
    Everett didn’t notice the storm clouds rolling in until a scalding thermite flash of lightning lit the whole block like napalm smacking a jungle ridgeline. It was followed by a boom of thunder so close he felt as much as heard it washing over him. The midday sky roiled with black clouds so thick the world looked underwater.
    A bigger boy walked by as another bolt of lightning split the sky wide open. Thunder cracked once more, and by that time Everett was on his feet. He remembered shivering happening as the sun’s light dimmed, but in memory the shivering was like watching a movie starring someone else, a random little unremarkable boy.
    “What was that?” Everett asked.
    “That ’s the storm giants,” the larger round faced boy said.
    “What are storm g iants?” Everett asked.
    “The storm g iants live up in the sky behind the clouds,” the bigger boy said. “Sometimes they like to bowl up there. Then you hear the thunder from their bowling balls hitting the pins.”
    He leaned closer , and his eyes glowed like the lightning. “Sometimes they look down and see a little kid all alone. Then they throw one of their thunderbolts, and lectercute ‘im.”
    A n even bigger lightning bolt poured zigzag across the sky, a river of light so bright it hurt. Then the thunder again, danger close: Krack a BOOM.
    Everett ran for home, and for his mommy. The lightning kept up for his entire endless slow motion progress down the block, illuminating the sky over and over, crashing down again and again in pursuit. Everett kept expecting the next lightning bolt to hit him, the anticipation so strong it made his back hurt, but they kept missing.
    The storm g iants laughed and shouted horrible things as the thunder boomed, loud enough it felt like it would knock him off his feet. And as Everett had already learned in his short life, once you were on the ground you were done, for then there was no more running.
    It seemed he’d never reach his front door. But then his hand slapped onto the knob and sent the door crashing inward against the wall.
    Bambi stood from the couch where she’d been watching the soaps and having a smoke in her robe.
    “What is it?” she asked.
    “There’s storm g iants out there, mom. You got to close the