Tornado Baby

by Jon Steinhagen

Winner of the Spring 2026 Editor’s Prize

Tornado Baby grew up and matured and was educated and worked for a spell at the DMV and married and had two children, both girls, and that felt like the end of her story.

There were a few things Tornado Baby clung to as her years piled up; boxes of merchandise, for instance, t-shirts and onesies with her title whooshed upon them, as if the wind itself had written it. The other things included scrapbooks of dwindling newspaper clippings (the last, entitled “Tornado Baby is a Total Babe,” had caused a brief scandal) and an insistence that she never leave the Tri-State area which locals and the more clownish meteorologists liked to call Tornado Alley.

“It picked me up and put me down,” Tornado Baby would either chant or sing (to a wandering tune of her own composition) to her little girls as she scooped them (one at a time) into the air and rushed them to the nearest couch for a firm but bouncy plop, and the girls would beg for more, chanting “Pigmy uppin’ puh-mee down!” until Tornado Baby felt her arms begin to tremble.

Tornado Baby never styled her hair or wore hats. If she had to go anywhere, she made sure these places were within walking distance. She preferred shortcuts through open fields. She thrilled at sudden stillness.

“It picked me up and put me down,” she would sing to herself as she went about her life, “and left me in another town.” A mid-May sky would turn limerick green; a distant siren would moan; Tornado Baby would drop whatever she was doing and head out of doors.

Tornado Baby had been asked, over and over again throughout the years, how she had felt on that long-ago afternoon, and she always answered that she had felt like an eagle and a salmon at the same time. She could have just said bird and fish, but thought the specificity would lend her miracle a charming verisimilitude (a word she had picked up by accident while in the Second Grade – Mrs. Hookle had always spoken above the comprehension of her students).

In truth, Tornado Baby remembered nothing of her voyage.

A young physician at the free clinic, much later, suggested that while Tornado Bay’s soul could not recall the event, her body did. She was given pills. The pills did zilch to ease her constant enervation.

Tornado Baby’s husband left her and took the children with him. He had no problem with Tornado Baby running outside the moment the wind sputtered and the skies bruised, but he drew the line at Tornado Baby plunking their girls into the path of things that might or might not arrive and then carry them away or merely rend them and strew them all over the county.

“Pick me up and put me down,” Tornado Baby, neither eagle nor salmon, both begged and sang at one-minute intervals as she passed flattened houses and overturned cars, her feet anchored to wherever she went.

JON STEINHAGEN is a Chicago-based author and dramatist; published works include a collection of short stories (The Big Book of Sounds) and a novel (The Hanging Artist). Recent stories can be found in Trampset and X-Ray Lit Mag.