On the way home all the traffic was going the other way. The wind made the traffic lights swing and flip like paper lanterns. She had that feeling she’d had at Christmas, as a child. As if someone was bringing her a present. Something shiny and loud and sharp and messy. She’d always loved bad weather. She’d always loved weather witches in their smart, black suits. Their divination kits, their dramatic seizures, their prophecies which were never entirely accurate, but which always rhymed smartly. When she was little she’d wanted more than anything to grow up and be a weather witch, although why that once had been true, she had no idea.

She rode her bike down to The Splinter. Got soaked. Didn’t care. Had a couple of whiskey sours, and then decided she was too excited about the hurricane to get properly drunk. She didn’t want to be drunk. And there wasn’t a man in the bar she wanted to bring home. The best part of hurricane sex was the hurricane, not the sex, so why bother?

The sky was green as a bruise and the rain was practically horizontal. There were no cars at all on the way home. She was only the least bit drunk. She went down the middle of the road and almost ran over an iguana four feet long, nose to tail. Stiff as a board, but its sides went out and in like little bellows. The rain got them like that, sometimes. They got stupid and slow in the cold. The rest of the time they were stupid and fast.

She wrapped her jacket around the iguana, making sure the tail was immobilized. You could break a man’s arm if you had a tail like that. She carried it under one arm, walking her bike all the way back to the house, and decided it would be a good idea to put it in the bathtub. Then she went back out into her yard with a flashlight. Checked the storm shutters to make sure they were properly fastened and discovered three more iguanas as she went. Two smaller ones and one real monster. She brought them all inside.

At eight p.m. it was pitch-dark. The hurricane was two dozen miles out. Picking up water to drop on the heads of people who didn’t want any more water. She dozed off at midnight and woke up when the power went off.

The air in the room was so full of water she had to gasp for breath. The iguanas were shadows stretched along the floor. The black shapes of the liquor boxes were every Christmas present she’d ever wanted.

Everything outside was clanking or buzzing or yanking or shrieking. She felt her way into the kitchen and got out the box with her candles and her flashlight and her emergency radio. The shutters banged away like a battle.