It wasn’t surprising it ended like that.

Arlen had always been intrigued by the unusual and the immense.

Instead of pushing cars across the living room floor, as a child he would constantly practice leaping from the top of furniture. As a five-year old, he once came home basted in grease after he found an old drum behind Drummond’s restaraunt, and tipped it by 14th Street and left his buddies behind as he climbed in it and rolled down the hill into the Presbyterian Church’s lot. He was disgustingly slimed and filthy, and unphased by it all. The barrel told him to do it.

Arlen was small for his age, but his mind made up for that. He was, in his mind, big enough to be big enough.

Arlen also collected spiders as pets, and kept them in cigar boxes in his room, to his parents’ dismay. If it wasn’t live ones crawling across their bedroom ceiling or the bed every few days, it was shiny crisp corpses in mugs and by books and in bowls that made them ask him if he wanted another pet instead. They got him a turtle, but he took it out to Miller’s swamp and let it go.

At 6, Arlen almost drowned at the spillway outside of town when he tried to launch a homemade boat into the this sluice of water released beneath the dam. His homemade boat was a raft of branches from the nearby poplar stand attached to the metallic bed of a discarded wagon. The boat was stead on the water until he stepped into it off of a window in the wall guiding water through the channel. Arlen’s satchel of fruit and a comic book was hooked by a by an upturned tong of metal grating, and as the boat sunk, the satchel strap held him under the window against the wall, head up, while the current pulled at him, trying to take him into the waiting pool. Mr. Mohl heard him walking by on his way home for lunch and pulled the tired boy out of the water.

On May 23rd, a little after dusk, the emergency alarms began whining from the speakers about town. It had been gray skied all day, but the barometric pressure had dropped around dinner time, and the sky was green. Everyone expected it to happen somewhere nearby- the awakening breeze, the drop in temperature, the swirl of moisture, the fall of the clouds, the quiet, then a cone dropping somewhere from the sky.

When Arlen’s parent’s heard the alarm, his dad turned on the radio to see if he could get more information from the local authorities, and his mother went to get the tornado kit from the back room closet. Rain spatted the windows and the wind whipped up outside against the house, and his dad said they needed to hurry out to the cellar doors at the side of the house.

Arlen had already left out the back door and ran down the grassy, gravelly alley two blocks, where headed for the water tower ladder.

The sky was blue and brown, churning and bruised and roiling over the town, lightning flashing 2 miles to the west, and hail began to fall, and Arlen climbed up the ladder in the growing moisture and rumbling, until he reached the platform welcoming him to the top.

And he held onto railings and watched the black clouds close on the town and the funnel spin out a quarter a mile away and pop power lines and throw sparks and then tear the roof of the department store and the grocery store, throwing metal and wood and plastics and papers into the air.

The wind roared and he was pounded by rain and he watched the hungry fattening funnel rip into three homes closer by, throw trees in the air, collapse awnings, strip shingles.

They found Arlen early the next morning with a long gash from his left temple to his forehead, crumpled 200 feet south of the tower in the unkempt field of grass beneath it.