Tornadoes, Grief, and Poutine

TORNADOES, GRIEF, AND POUTINE 

by Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga

(Content warnings: themes of death and grief)

“Let’s make this a clean race, shall we?” My uncle blows a mosquito off his wrist and a watch materializes in its place. “On your marks…”

I crouch on my knees and grin at my senge, teeth chattering even though this isn’t the first time. “If I win, I get to quit track.”

Her tornado tears up a bit of sod near the entrance of Southwest Regional Library. The building’s pink facade looks dusty against her spinning. I look for a face inside the vortex, for a sign that my paternal aunt still lives.

“Get set...”

I raise my heels. My uncle shakes out his sleeves. His neon yellow work shirt changes to sunbeam silk as I watch. His dirt-stained pants become tight denim. He takes off his damp tent of a hat and glances at each of us through gold-tipped sunglasses. Gone is the landscaper of median strips, except for his boots. I look ahead. If only he’d completed his Master’s.

“Go!”

•••

I don’t remember the first time I met my senge. I remember the last.

She lay in a hospital bed we had set up in our dining room. I was eight. My uncle crouched to the floor and used my sleeve as a tissue. I remember thinking he should use his own sleeve.

“Ngwino,” she suddenly beckoned. My uncle shot to his feet, but she waved him away and gestured to me. My uncle had to lift me so she could pull my ear to her mouth. She whispered fiercely in a language I couldn’t understand.

“Quoi?” I asked.

Grumbling, she commanded my uncle. “Sobanura.”

He set me down and told me to listen close. “Your aunt says, you like running, so you’ll run. Faster than anyone. You’ll keep running for the rest of your life.”

I frowned. “But I don’t like running.”

She spit out her words like a motorcycle starting up, her face scrunching in a fierce scowl. My uncle blurted, “It’s the least you can do for being the death of me.” He held his mouth, too late to stop the words from reaching my ears. I remember my mom entering the room at that exact moment and shooing us out. I could hear her scolding my uncle from my bedroom upstairs. She was the only one who understood I had just been cursed.

•••

I shoot across the street, my steps echoing across the intersection. No one’s out because of the severe tornado warning and, well, the actual tornado. My senge won’t follow for now. She agreed to give me a 20-minute head start.

“De toute façon, she’ll win,” my uncle said.

Attends que je te montre, I think. These are the legs that won a state championship in sophomore year. Twice scouts have come to watch me practice. If I cared about running, that would have been an exciting prospect, but I just want to quit.

The one and only time I mentioned the word curse, my friend Katie nodded, then refused to speak to me for a week. It wasn’t long before I realized she took the entire team with her. Katie was my closest friend then. And she was second best on the team, too.

My coach pulled me aside. “The sport doesn’t need people like you, Vi,” she said. Worse than a slap, a door to the face. “Your peers need someone to believe in, not someone with excuses.”

So I was bringing down morale, and no one wanted to back me on my quest to quit. I’d just wanted support, but my senge had taken even that.

All of that mess will end now. Once I win this race, I’ll quit and leave all of it behind. All I need to do is reach the ocean before that tornado does. What’s usually a 30- to 45-minute drive takes 7 hours walking. I have the speed and endurance to half that. It’s what I’ve trained for.

•••

I didn’t mind running at first. It burned away my thoughts. It burned away my heartbeat, until there was only breath, step, and nothing else.

Come middle school, I wanted to try something new. All my friends from track were going into art or cheerleading.

“Come to tryouts with us, Vi!”

“You can’t run forever, Vi.”

One thing about track: hesitate and you’re left behind. I felt it in the turned heads chatting excitedly about trying for the dance team. Running was getting old.

My uncle had finally moved out of the apartment he’d shared with my senge, three years after the fact. His new one-bedroom managed to feel sadder. Thinking of my senge was getting old too. 

The day after I missed track tryouts, there was a severe tornado warning—which was odd in the middle of hurricane season—and schools were shut down. I was chilling in my bedroom when the doorbell rang. I heard hushed voices. My mom called me down the stairs.

“You missed tryouts?” she snapped.

I sighed. “I don’t like running, Maman.”

“Your senge cursed you. You must run!”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “It’s not like she’ll kill me.”

“You’re right. But she will race you.” My uncle stood at the door, work boots dusty and hat askew, wind blowing its flaps up and down. “You promised to run, Vi. You’re lucky your senge is generous. If you beat her in a race, she’ll allow you to stop running.”

“Tantine is here?” I peeked through the door, looking for my senge, but no one waited behind my uncle. My throat felt sticky. Who said I promised her I’d keep running? Weren’t they forcing me?

“She’s not here in the physical sense,” my uncle explained, “but if you come with me—”

“You’re lying! Tantine’s gone.” I snapped. “If you’re so desperate to see someone run, why don’t you race her yourself? I’m done with running.”

A howl tore through the sky, unlike any hurricane wind. It made me think of a wounded animal or a hungry beast. I couldn’t decide which. It came with a strong wind that knocked my uncle backwards. His hat went flying. A beanie materialized to replace it. A palm frond swept behind him, sucked away by an unseen maelstrom. Several car alarms blared. Glass shattered. I found myself clutching my uncle’s sleeve, fingers shaking. I couldn’t lose him, too. 

“That was your senge,” he said. “We can’t keep her waiting.”

•••

My legs pump in a steady rhythm to the beat of someone’s reggaeton playlist. I pass by a house with no hurricane shutters, flashing flamingo pink under a flat roof. I wonder how it will last through a tornado. Other houses flash by in colors more vibrant than they seem when my dad drives past them. Sandy yellows are now rich gold. Bleached blues are aquamarine. There are colors I haven’t seen here before: palm leaf green, coconut white, trick car purple. I almost slow down to check if my eyes aren’t playing tricks on me. The colors of the houses leave a feathery trail, reminding me of the imparambwe in the story of Maguru ya Sarwaya. 

The mythical beasts are faster than cheetahs, my senge said. Faster than the wind. The sky growls as if the street is alive with them.

This isn’t the Sheridan Street I know.

On the other side of the road, the Everglades peeks through the developed concrete in small stretches. I can picture Maguru ya Sarwaya hiding in the grass, waiting to cut the feather tail off an imparambwe.

The stink of saltwater hangs in the air like a continuous fart. I gulp it in, willing it to mean I’m that much closer to the ocean.

Then a shadow lands with a shrieking crunch before me: a hurricane shutter. Wind whips grit at my back. Palm trees sway. A leaf slaps my cheeks. My senge swirls lazily over the swampland to my left, flinging leaves at me. I see thin grass blades mixed in and dodge in earnest. Sawgrass at several miles an hour is no mere papercut.

One nicks my cheek. I suck my teeth. My senge and her obsession with Maguru ya Sarwaya. If there wasn’t that annoying story about a hunter that outruns the wind, maybe the terms of my senge’s curse would’ve been fairer. A race between the two of us maybe, rather than with a monstrous tornado.

•••

My senge wasn’t always a tornado. On nights when I’d sleep over at Tantine and Tonton’s place, my senge would sit me in her lap and tell me the story of Maguru ya Sarwaya. 

“There was a great hunter, a fast hunter. When drought plagued the land, he was chosen by his chief to pluck the tail off a beast that was as fast as the wind. The tail was like a great feather.”

Here my uncle would interject with some elaborate description. “The tail was like a great multicolored feather, majestic in its riot of sunset hues.” My uncle would make grand gestures with his hands and go back to writing elaborate monologues for his play. 

I thought that all Master’s were as fun as writing a play, until my dad frowned and said serious Master’s degrees are big essays. To me they both involved paper and words, so I thought serious Master’s degrees were boring plays. My uncle’s Master’s was in African folklore. He wanted to write a folktale into a play, and perform all the roles.

Laughing, my senge continued the story. “Yes, big and colorful that tail was. It belonged to that beast of beasts. It was never hunted because it was also a hunter. We called this beast the imparambwe. And these imparambwe hunted in packs.

“The great and fast hunter tracked down where the imparambwe gathered around their freshly caught prey, and while they were distracted, he cut off one of their tails and ran. He ran so fast, he outran even the wind!”

There, my senge would spin me around to simulate the feeling of the wind.

“I’m fast too!” I would cry. “I can outrun the wind!”

“Oh, I believe you, Vi.”

When she put me down, she would tell the rest of the story in a grave voice. “The imparambwe missed her tail. She was sad. She was angry. She couldn’t run like she used to. So she tried to lure the hunter into a trap. The imparambwe turned into a beautiful woman, and the hunter fell in love with her. When she thought he least expected it, she turned back into an imparambwe and tried to eat him, but the hunter was quicker still. He grabbed his spear and killed the imparambwe.”

I remember pouting. “That’s sad. What happened to her tail?”

“Oh the chief had her tail, and the tail’s magic ended the drought, but she didn’t go after the chief, did she?” My senge tickled me in her lap. “No, she wanted revenge against the hunter, and revenge is never good.”

There was always a different lesson, but they were all the same. “Don’t stay angry with someone for long, ma petite,” my senge said. “It will only hurt you in the long run.”

•••

It rains alligators. At first it’s only a few that scurry onto the road, scared by the spinning funnel. Then it’s the baby reptiles flung in my path, followed by mammoth ones that flop onto the concrete and yawn, too tired to move again. I leap over them all, even a gaping mouth half my height.

What’s worse: racing an imparambwe or my aunt? One can eat me, but the other throws shopping carts.

My senge slows down. I smirk. That’s what she gets for trying to move through water. Maybe she came across a deeper section of pond.

By the time I remember to look ahead, a fish smacks me head on.

#

My senge and uncle had an apartment on the edge of a canal, an hour drive from my house, fifteen minutes from the university. I was seven.

“Why do you live so far away?” I’d complain.

“But you’re a lot closer now!” my senge laughed.

My family had just moved down from Canada for work.

There was a long strip of green where we would play tag or race each other. I loved to race. I never got tired of it, until I did. My uncle was still doing his Master’s then, so when my senge babysat, we were always outside.

“You should become a runner like your tantine,” my senge said.

“But I don’t want to run, Tantine,” I said. “I just like beating you because you’re slow.”

“Your tantine was the fastest,” she said. “Try and beat her now.”

I sped away, stepping on her foot as I did so. When I looked back, she was on the grass. I thought she was taking a weird nap.

•••

Consciousness smells fishy. I smack slimy scales off my face. To think fish live in canals. That one was big enough to knock me out cold.

My senge spins further away. Looking back, I can still see the pink facade of the library. I’m not even halfway to the sea and I’m losing sorely.

I start into a jog, then a loping rhythm that I hope will make up for lost time.

A car honks. My uncle waves from his pickup truck. It drives at a crawl, bumping over tree branches. As I watch, his head grows a straw hat. A long blade of grass pokes out of his mouth.

“Give up!” he calls.

“Why?” I snap.

He spits out the grass. “She likes you running.”

I roar into a sprint, losing all form and rhythm. If she liked running so much, why did she marry him? Why did she follow him all the way to this anglophone country, struggle to learn English and get into an American college? Why didn’t she go to Canada to live with my mom’s sister? If she had gone to live there, if I hadn’t stepped on her foot...

I trip on a branch and land on my knees. The skin scrapes off. I get up and limp onwards. A car door slams. I slap my uncle’s hand away.

“This is all your fault, you know that?” I snap. “Just because you failed to make her happy, doesn’t mean you need to put it on me.”

He doesn’t reply. His footsteps linger behind me, throwing me off even more.

I miss the uncle that would puff out his chest and burst into a speech, switching characters at will. Now he’s the case study my dad uses when I get a C. “Don’t become the people who cut grass in the middle of the road, like your uncle.”

It doesn’t matter that he works two other jobs, including a recent internship in quelque chose IT-related. He’s just sad. His unfinished play hides in a drawer, sighing with waste.

I growl into a hop skip limp, cursing my luck, wondering if I’ll have to run for the rest of my life. Maybe if I hurt myself enough, she’ll let it go. I doubt it, but maybe.

Sweat trickles down my neck. Humidity clings to me. The air never clung to me in Canada. The thought raises goosebumps, as if my body remembers running there. The overwhelming fish smell gives way to dead grass and thawed snow.

•••

I don’t remember the first time I met my senge, but this might be it. She waved to us in a turtleneck, slipping through the slush with my uncle. We lived in Canada back then. She gave me a conch shell that whispered in my ear. My feet bounced on dead grass, giggles filling my lungs.

“You’re so fast, ma petite!” she cooed. “It runs in the family.”

My parents had built her up for me, knowing how much I liked to run around the house, much to my mother’s chagrin. So I challenged my senge to race after race, and won every time. She convinced me I was faster.

Something changed though, something I saw in her face. We heard a cry, scared and trapped. I try to follow it, but the whole scene blurs.

•••

My nose picks up on a smell I never expected this far south. “Poutine?”

Up ahead is a white shack with picnic tables outside. There’s a wooden sign scratched with the words ‘Fry King’ on it. Either side of the lot is shrub. In all my years of riding in the car with my dad, I’ve never seen it before. I thought the nearest poutine place was in Dania Beach.

To my surprise, a tall African man greets me behind the counter. His wall is plastered with five-star reviews and a picture with some Hawaiian-shirted tourists from Trois-Rivières. What’s curious is the single feather hanging from the ceiling. It dances under the electric fan, reflecting the sunlight in multicolored rays. It looks too crystalline to be from a parrot.

I stutter my order, then gather the courage to ask. “Are you from Québec?”

“Yes.” The man raises an eyebrow. “Are you?”

I’m not sure anymore. My uncle sneaks up behind me and settles the bill. I sit across from him at a picnic table, avoiding eye contact.

“I thought she no longer liked running,” he says. My uncle twirls his fry, trying to wrap a piece of melted cheese around it. His straw hat withers into a beret. “Ever since she hurt her leg, she told me, ‘I’m done, Alexandre. Finis.’ I thought she was being dramatic, that she’d go back to training eventually. Then she decided to come with me, support me with my Master’s.” He shrugs. “It was raining that day. I thought it was a blessing for us.” He dips the fry in the poutine’s gravy and chews thoughtfully. “But maybe I forced her to come, I don’t know. Maybe I was the death of her dream.”

I swallow my own fries in mouthfuls. My plate seems incapable of running out of the filling, delicious stuff. “So this is ta faute,” I finally say. “Why didn’t she make you run?”

My uncle laughs. “I’m not the one who promised.”

“What promise?”

He smacks his hands together in supplication. “Please, just keep running for her.”

I frown. “Whatever promise I made, I was just a little girl.”

“Do you know what will happen if you win this race?” he asks. “She’ll be... fwit.” He motions to wipe something from the air. “Pour de vrai, this time.”

•••

The person in the casket wasn’t my senge. They looked like a bad copy dolled up to look like her, but Tantine wasn’t inside. She wasn’t home and she would never come back home. After this funeral, my uncle was taking the copy back to Rwanda for the burial. He didn’t smile, didn’t look at me when I hugged him. Tantine wasn’t here and everyone was sad about it. No one looked at me, as if they knew it was my fault.

During the reception, I went to see my uncle. He sat hunched on a step, trembling despite the heat.

“I’m sorry, Tonton,” I said.

He lifted his head, wiped his eyes and sniffed. “It’s okay. I’ll be okay.”

“But it’s my fault Tantine got sick. I stepped on her foot. C’est ma faute qu’elle est morte.”

My uncle widened his eyes and took both my hands. “No, ma belle, it’s not your fault.”

“But she said–”

“Non, ceceka,” my uncle shushed me and rubbed my back. I was crying, I think. “Rere didn’t mean those bad words. If anything, I was the death of her.” His body shuddered. “It’s all my fault. If I hadn’t brought her with me, if I’d told her she could stay home and run while I studied, that her injury didn’t matter if she loved running so much, then she wouldn’t have fallen sick.”

We didn’t say anything for a bit. Then, my uncle wiped his eyes again and squeezed my hands. “You have to keep your promise, Vi. Keep running for her.”

•••

I stab my fork into my empty tray. “I want to move on, but all you and Tantine keep doing is hold me back. And for what? Something an eight-year-old promised? Don’t use me as a lifeboat!”

I stomp over to the poutine counter and order a banana split. The owner brings it out, no questions asked. The vanilla dissolves into a lake while I sulk. Why can’t my uncle just finish his Master’s? Why can’t my senge let go of me?

I mull over the idea of a promise. Yes, maybe I liked running as a child, but that’s it. Wanting to run isn’t the same as promising it.

The feather swirls above the back of the owner’s head. It catches all colors, like a rainbow after a five-minute rainstorm. A breeze swings past. I catch the chill smell of early spring, dead grass covered in damp. It’s quickly replaced by humidity, suffocating and familiar.

“What kind of feather is it?” I ask.

The owner looks up, perplexed. “I’m not sure. I’ve had it a long time. It belonged to a noble creature, I think.” He unties the rope around it. “Want to touch it?” 

I take it between my hands. Its touch feels alive, as if it’s about to flutter out of my hands. I hear a faint cry, scared and trapped, an echo of a memory.

“I’ll give it to you,” the owner says.

“No, I can’t accept this,” I say.

“I insist,” he replies. “Whatever it belonged to wouldn’t want it to hang in a poutine eatery. I’m just setting it free.”

Like lightning, it strikes me. The memory of beating feathers on a crying bird.

•••

The first time I met my senge, it was early spring, warm enough for just a turtleneck, grass dead and squishy under my sneakers.

“You’re hurting it!” I cried.

“We’re setting it free,” my senge said.

With that, the bird flapped its wings and shot out of the bush.

“I want to fly!” I cried.

“Me too,” my senge said. She squinted in the sun’s direction and wiped her eyes.

A brilliant idea came to me. “Let’s fly together!”

My senge chuckled and wiped her eyes again.

I saw her race my dad afterward. She won by a narrow margin, but it looked halfhearted. I remember shrieking at her. She lied. She’s faster than fast. It’s unfair. “When I grow up, I’ll be vite, plus vite que toi. I’ll be the fastest of them all!”

My senge laughed. “Okay, promise me.”

We linked pinkies. I feel the warmth of it now, spreading through the palm of my hand.

#

Before I realize it, I’m outside, facing the endless stretch of carnage-littered road before it ends at the beach. I take one step, then another, and gather to a jog. All the while, the rest of that afternoon streams through my mind in the vivid colors of the feather I’m clutching. How I ran back and forth across the yard, tumbling down a grassy hill, feeling like my tantine was everything I needed from an adult.

I’m sprinting now. The poutine in my stomach burns into fuel, urging me on.

There’s a honking. I glance sideways at my uncle waving from his truck. I’m keeping pace with him, or maybe it’s the other way around. He watches my running form. His sunglasses lighten to normal lenses, yellow shirt bleaching to white. I see his wide eyes. He shouts something I don’t catch. “What?”

He conjures a megaphone. “Tell her I’m sorry!”

“Tell her toi-même!”

“Then tell her I love her!”

“Mais, tell–”

I leap over a large palmetto fallen over sideways. My uncle squeals to a stop, watching me go.

“Tell her!” He blasts.

I roll my eyes and speed up my pace. The sun sinks behind me, throwing pinks in the sky except for the part where my senge still swirls.

The edge of the road looms ahead. I know how close I am to losing. My senge roars, sending mangrove branches and palm fronds flying towards me. I dodge, eyes stinging. Her winds are already pulling sand from the beach. My lungs scream with all my intention to win, once and for all.

I reach her side, the depths of her funnel unfathomable. She seems to slow down, a result of her proximity to the water. In the whirlwind I glimpse the head of a leopard, a body with no tail. It seems to whine in pain.

Something slams into my torso. Flipping into a barrel roll, I heft myself back into a run. It was a wooden rail. My shoes crunch on gravel. I’m in a parking lot.

A sign advertising Keating Beach rolls past. My senge flings back a sandstorm. I wade through it, spitting out sand as I brush past mangroves. Sand spits in my eyes. I close them and hold tight to the feather.

Yelling with all my air, I leap ahead, eating sand with each step, willing myself to fly. My feet bounce on seaweed. It propels them up. Just when I think I’ve lost, they splash through water. I tumble into the surf.

•••

The breeze is soft, like the air after a hurricane rather than a tornado. I open my eyes to pink lemonade sky. Everything is crisp and clean.

“Félicitations.”

I turn to my left and see Tantine smiling at me. Her face is a tight oval with deep dimples, braids bright orange in the setting sun. I’d almost forgotten it.

The waves darken as the sun sinks behind us. “Tiens,” I say, handing her the feather. “I think you know who this belongs to.”

Tantine nods and shifts to stand.

“Oh and Tonton says he loves you,” I add.

Tantine chuckles. “He already told me.”

“Why did you force me to run?” I pout. “That was mean.”

Tantine leans down and kisses my forehead. “Mbabarira, ma petite. I was selfish. I wanted more time to run with you.”

She stands and it’s like the sun is leaving me with her. I hug her legs. “Bye, Tantine Nirere.”

She chuckles. “Au revoir, Vite.”

As she turns towards the beach, the shape of a leopard follows, streaked in the sunset’s receding colors. Tantine smooths the feather on its back and a tail sprouts where a stump was. Together they zip across the waves.

“Hey!” My uncle calls. His jeans shorten to khaki shorts as he plops next to me. I put my face into his shoulder and weep. The cloth there softens into a blanket.

“I know, ma petite,” he says, wrapping the blanket around me.

He lets me cry for a bit. Before it gets too dark to sit there on the sand, he pulls out his phone. “You’re trending,” he says. “They’re calling you the ‘girl who outran a tornado.’ ” He elbows me playfully. “Like a mini Maguru ya Sarwaya.”

I roll my eyes. “Yeah, well, he retired after that.”

There’s only blue left now, streaks of indigo in a luminous twilight.

“Tantine says you need to finish your Master’s,” I say.

My uncle snorts. “Nice try. I spoke to her too.”

“I really want to see your play though.”

He pauses long enough for me to take a picture of his slack jaw. He swipes his phone back. “Okay, I will. Now let’s go.”

“I can’t stand.”

“This big and still a baby!”

I giggle.

The ocean stretches past his shoulder. Waves glitter with scattered stars, so rare on these Miami-adjacent shores. On the horizon is a streak of orange, homebound.