PodCastle 612: She Searches for God in the Storm Within

* Author : Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali

* Narrator : Stephanie Malia Morris

* Host : Summer Fletcher

* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh

Originally published in Sword and Sonnet.

Content warning: domestic violence

Rated PG-13.

She Searches for God in the Storm Within

By Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali

When I arrived at my grandmother’s, in the stillness of predawn, like some restless cat stalking, she was waiting for me on the front porch. It was as if she’d been expecting me. I suppose if she had been watching the sky, she was, because I could be seen for miles. My scarf had come unwrapped and my hair had unfurled into a roiling trail of luminescent heaped up clouds threatening to burst.

The air was thick with the metallic scent of rain and sweet jasmine. I stopped just inside the gate when I caught sight of my grandmother, chest heaving, trying with great difficulty to thin my lowering nimbus into one more presentable. All the excuses I’d contrived for why I was coming to her home at this unseemly hour, after all these years away from home, dissolved.

I did not need them. She would not judge me. She would welcome me home.

Grandma May glided soundlessly in her rocking chair, her eyes mirroring the yellow moonlight. I felt her gaze on me like fingers, probing the bruises, the lump on my forehead, my split lip. I gasped, as did she, when my pain telegraphed in tiny sparks across the distance to her when she grazed the tenderest spots.

A sharp hot pain shot through my left ankle, right along the healed over fracture in my talus. Grandma May’s gaze shifted to the turbulent sky where seconds later a twin lightning strike split the horizon like an angry slap.

“Yeah, I know,” she said to me, to the sky, to no one in particular. Perhaps to God. “You’ve got to decide what you’re going to do, child. Let us know how you feel, or hold back the storm.”

After that I went to pieces.

I stayed in my mother’s old bedroom, walls, floor and ceiling sealed with rubber. Part of me occupied the bed, fleshy lower limbs partially clothed, while the rest of me stretched upward in an agonizing aerosol clinging to the ceiling. My grandmother ran a fan and the window unit on the lowest setting to precipitate cooling, to keep me from spreading outward and beyond. My grandmother sang a familiar old country lullaby meant to soothe my worrying and anger, to quiet the thunder rolling off my skin.

Her sweet susurration helped me not think about the fight. I blamed myself more than Reef because I should have known it was coming. Reef ’s excuses, followed by bitter words, then the pushes, the slaps, that one shove down the stairs. I saw hatred sharp as a dagger in his eyes while he was whispering his love for me, if you can believe. What happened tonight was months in the making, but clear as glass if I had wanted to look through it. All this time I’d managed to keep the storm at bay. Not even a distant rumble. Not a single shower to purge the buildup. I’d been strong until tonight, finding strength in the names of God.

As Salaam. Bestower of Peace. Al Mughith. The Sustainer. Al Raqib. The Watchful.

Imagine Reef ’s surprise when he threw his fist and it passed through a storm cloud, that the hairs on his knuckles and arm were singed away, the skin damp and tingling with electric heat.

“We ain’t had a bad storm in a long time. Perhaps I shouldn’t say bad, because it’s only bad for us. For you, it’s something different, I suppose.