 Growing up, I remember my mother spending quite a lot of time sending in front of the television, working on her various knitting projects and other crafts. She was always watching the weather channel when she did this. Our house was tiny, and my brother Joshua and I could almost always see her from where we'd been playing. I remember asking her why she always watched boring things. She just chuckled and said that she needed to make sure that no storms were coming and that I would better understand when I was older. And as I did get older, I did begin to understand it a bit better. The first time I remember realizing that the storms here weren't quite normal was when I was in elementary school, maybe second or third grade. I'd been sitting on the swing set caught up in a childhood daydream when I felt a single drop of rain fall on my nose. I shook my face to get it off and looked up to see one of the playground monitors blowing her whistle and pointing at the sky. The other monitors looked over and blew their whistles to signal us to get inside. We lined up in alphabetical order as we always did and were rushed inside. I walked back to my classroom with the rest of the class and we took our seats at our desks. Surprise, everyone. My teacher announced, we'll be getting to leave early today. We just have to wait for the buses to get here. If you normally get picked up, we're still going to wait in the parking lot like normal. One student raised her hand. Why do we get to leave Miss Maya? I don't want to miss our time. The teacher smiled. The weather changed and it seems like we might have a bad storm and we don't want you all walking home in it. When we were finally escorted to our buses, I sat next to Josh as always. He was playing on his DS. I looked at his screen to see him playing some type of platformer game intently focused on the level he was on at the moment. When he finally finished playing, Josh looked out the window towards a rapidly darkening sky. My friend Dwayne says that his mom told him that there are monsters inside of the clouds and that's why they send us home. Josh blurted out, don't tell mom or dad, but I'm staying up tonight to see if I can see one. I nodded. Can I watch? Yeah, just don't tell and don't be a cry baby if we see one. I gripped my backpack a bit tighter. I was at that transitional age where monsters were still scary, but I was also terribly curious about them. The bus dropped us off at our house really quickly that day. My father was sitting on the front stoop and a look of relief washed over his face when he saw the school bus pull up. Josh and I hopped out of our seats and headed down the bus's aisle and into our front yard. The rain had picked up since we left the school. Now I would have at least considered it a drizzle. Hey, boys, my father said, let's get inside, huh? We followed him in. My mother was knitting in her lazy boy, staring at the weather radar on the television. You locked the windows, right, sweetheart? She asked my father, the windows and the doors. He replied, don't worry. I know I can't help it. She murmured back. My father made some sandwiches for Josh and me since we hadn't gotten the chance to eat at school. I had a grilled cheese. He had peanut butter and jelly, just like always. After that, Josh retreated to our room to play his DS some more. And I sat at the table working on my multiplication tables. I wanted to ask my parents if monsters were coming, but knew better than to snitch on Josh, so I stayed quiet until our bedtime. I climbed into my bed like normal, trying my best not to giggle at the fact that I was going to be staying up past my bedtime and give up our plan. My mother tapped me in and gave me a kiss on the forehead, then wished us good night before slipping out of the room. Josh, I whispered almost as soon as she left. Are we going to do it? Yeah, he said. And I heard the creaking of the ladder to the top bunk. I sprung out of bed, which caused the ancient floorboards to emit a rather loud groaning sound. Josh shushed me with a glare, then crept to the only window in the room. Josh cracked the curtains open and got to his knees to look at the very bottom. I was still a lot shorter than him, so I had to stand to see. The storm was a really bad one. I could tell that immediately. While it was incredibly dark out for the most part, bolts of lightning would illuminate the whole street as bright as day every few minutes. Trees leaned over in the wind, their lost leaves swirling through the air and getting caught in the steady stream of water rushing down the street into the storm drain. The rain poured down against the roof of the house, filling it with a sound of drumming water interrupted occasionally by the boom of thunder. I don't see any monsters. I explained to Josh, let's just wait. He said, and so we waited by that window for what felt like hours to a kid my age, but might have only been 15 or so minutes in reality. Then we saw it. The creature, if you can call it a creature at all. Was like a walking storm cloud. In fact, I just thought it was a strange shadow at first, just a clump of murky darkness. But then it began to reveal itself as something much alive. It moved slowly with tendrils of its dark mass reaching out around it. At the same time as it began to advance through my field of view, a squirrel ran out of a nearby tree. The creature began moving much faster towards the squirrel, a long arm like piece of darkness reaching out to grab it. The arm pick the squirrel up, then wrapped around it and pulled back into the main mass. I waited for the squirrel to reappear or something. But it never did. As I waited for it to emerge from the creature, I began to panic. My breath quickened and I got really lightheaded. The last thing I remember was feeling dizzy and reaching out to try and grab my dresser to hold me up. I then woke up on my parents bed, my mother pacing the room in her floral nightgown. What happened, mama? I asked, sitting up in the bed. Oh, thank God, she exclaimed and flung herself onto the bed to wrap me in a bear hug. Though I realize now that I must have just passed out from fear, Josh told my parents that I must have been sleepwalking and fallen, not wanting to admit he was awake after our bedtime. I went along with the story and the monsters in the storm became a topic of conversation, almost as taboo as sex in my mind. I knew I wasn't supposed to tell my parents what I'd been doing that night. And we never talked about anything ever again, at least until a brief conversation we had when I moved out, which I hardly remember. That was the first time I ever saw the monsters. I never sought them out again. In fact, quite the opposite. I avoided looking outside my window at all costs. Whenever the weather was even slightly stormy. And once I was on my own, I became like my mother. I am a freelance graphic designer, and I would sit with my laptop open in front of my own television, just watching the weather reports and praying not to see any storms heading my way. Everyone in the area is extremely wary of going outside during storms. But I was pretty over the top with it, refusing to leave my house if there was even a slight sprinkle or chance of thunder. But alas, I saw the monsters again. Just last night I knew the storm coming was going to be a bad one, rain, thunder, hail, and anything else that you can imagine were predicted to terrorize the town for four straight days. I'm a real apocalypse prepper when it comes to storms around here. And this one was no different. I went to my local Walmart and stocked up on canned goods, bottled water and other household staples to make sure that I wouldn't have to leave my house for the whole week on the trip back from the store. I ran into my landlord who lives in the other side of the duplex. He was packing up his car. When I asked him where he was headed, he just looked at me and shook his head. You were probably too young to remember the last time this town got a storm this bad. But it wasn't anything to screw around with. I ain't staying. I'm going to visit my brother in Springfield. He explained, then slam the trunk of his car shut. It was a fairly nerve wrecking experience and set me on edge for the next couple of days. When the first green bits on the weather radar hit our town, I felt OK. I knew the storm was going to be a real doozy. The weatherman had said it was one of the worst to hit our town in years. I began to get nervous with what the landlord had said and considered leaving for myself. But realized that I had nowhere to go, unless I decided to visit my parents on the other side of town, where I highly doubted the storm would be any less severe. As the first day pressed on, the storm got really bad, really fast. I tried to throw myself into my work or anything else to distract myself, but it just wasn't working. Eventually, I simply resorted to pacing back and forth between the three rooms of the duplex and occasionally shooting texts to my friends and family to check in with them and see if anything terrible had happened near them. Nothing bad happened, and I managed to get some sleep that night, quite often interrupted by large booms of thunder. And then came yesterday, the storm was still raging around seven in the morning, which is when I woke up. That was much earlier than normal for me. But there was an odd noise coming from my front yard, just barely audible over the pouring rain and howling winds. I went to my window and peered out nervously, just to see my worst fears met. My heart sank as I watched. I tried closing the curtain, but the idea that the creature could just be doing anything it wanted to in my front yard brought me right back to watch. Eventually the creature finished up on the tree, as well as ripping the door off of my mailbox and moved to my landlord's side of the yard. And I could no longer get a good angle to view it from. I just sat on my couch, unable to decide what to do next. So I just did nothing. And then I heard a crack noise. Very quiet, but so clear in my mind, I could tell it came from my basement, where I hardly ever went. I walked over to the door that led to the stairwell and placed my hand on the knob, heart racing. It took me a couple of seconds to work up the courage to open the door. But I finally did and hated what I saw. There's only one window in my basement and the single pane of glass in it had been shattered through the broken glass. Two things poured into my basement. There was water rushing in on the way to ruining the equipment down there, no doubt. And also something far, far worse. Tendrils of shadow creptin amalgamating into a lump of a creature on top of my dryer. I didn't even think just sprinted for my keys and then out to my car without a second thought. I just drove as fast as I could, as far as I could until several hours later when my tank was almost completely empty. By that time, I was far from home and the weather had begun to clear from there. I got a hotel, which is where I am now. And I've just been sitting around waiting ever since. I'm not sure when or even if I'll go back at all. I left everything back there. But I guess I'm scared the thing stayed in my house and it's just going to be waiting for me when I get back.