The townspeople said the storm was the worst in twenty years, but my mother said it wasn’t a storm at all. It was a reckoning.

Lightning cracked the church steeple the moment her water broke. My father, Nathan, tried to floor the old pickup through sheets of rain, but the road was a river, swallowing the tires whole. She screamed through the wind that bent the cornfields flat, whispered a prayer between contractions, and then cursed whatever god refused to answer.

By the time they reached the bridge, the creek had climbed to its banks. The headlights caught a shape moving in the torrent. It was a pale, slick thing with too many limbs. My mother said she felt it pass through her before the baby came. Said she heard it say it’s already begun.

I was born in that truck, under a sky flashing like a broken signal. No doctor, no witness, but the water swallowing the road. My father swears I didn’t cry, only stared. My eyes weren’t blue then, he likes to add. They were the color of rain on metal.

Every year, when the thunder rolls over Ash Hollow, the power flickers and the creek rises again. Folks say it’s nothing but weather. But my mother still pulls me inside, saying storms don’t pass; they return, looking for what they left behind.