Storm of the Year: Ten Sentence Story #168

Jerald and his wife were excited enough about the upcoming Halloween holiday when they found out that there was going to be an enormous storm blowing through their Queens neighborhood, and that many of their friends in Brooklyn were going to have to evacuate their homes.

It was not just a storm — it was a hurricane that was called Sandy, and Jerald and his wife spent at least an hour arguing over whether it was referring to a man called Sandy or a woman called Sandy, as the name was gender neutral.

Jerald went to Trader Joe’s that Sunday where they had a hard time finding anything to buy — they were entirely sold out of bottled water, orange juice, and soysages but had plenty of marinated mozzarella, for some reason.

Jerald’s wife went to the local bodega to find all of the things that Jerald could not find — she had no problem getting water and bread that the owner of the bodega baked that morning, and so Jerald’s wife knew that she could make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in case there was a problem with their electricity going out.

Neither Jerald nor his wife had to go on Monday as they worked in lower Manhattan and there was no way for them to get to the office as the MTA had shut down all services.

They spent the day playing board games and talking about what they were going to do for Halloween, and things related to the election and the concept of flip flopping and how it could be possible for one candidate to have such differing beliefs that they could not imagine ever wanting to vote for him.

They slept soundly that night, with the loud pounding of raindrops against their apartment and the wind howling being like the best white noise maker ever made, only they didn’t particularly care for the circumstances in which the noise maker was brought about.

The following morning they woke up late and enjoyed a cup of coffee and had toast with butter on it and talked about how crazy it was that there were people who were housed in evacuation zones who refused to leave their homes for whatever reason.

They once again did not have to go to their offices and instead spent the day reading and catching up on correspondence, writing letters to friends and family and telling them what was going on in their lives.

It wasn’t until Wednesday that everything was back to normal — and just in time, because Jerald was really worried that he was not going to have the opportunity to give out candy and chocolates that night to the children and those who were children at heart in the neighborhood.