“One, two, three.” She covered her ears and counted like she had when she was a child. When she got to ten, thunder rolled off in the distance. That meant the storm was ten miles away and could possibly make a turn and not even come near Blossom.

Wake up, April! her grandmother’s voice screamed inside her head. We’ve got to go to the cellar. God is punishing me for my sins.

April tried to shake the storm voice, as she had called it when she was a child, from her head. She never knew why God was punishing her grandmother, or how she could have possibly sinned when she was in church every time the doors opened, but in the recurring nightmares, Nanny Lucy kept repeating the same thing over and over.

“You were so religious that there’s no way you sinned,” April whispered just as another flash lit up the room. In that instant she didn’t know if she was really awake or if she was still dreaming, because she could swear that Nanny Lucy was sitting in her rocking chair at the end of the sofa.

“One, two, three.” She counted again and could tell that the thunder was getting closer.

“Screw this,” she said as she pushed back the sheet and got out of the sofa bed. She tiptoed across the room and discovered that no one was sitting in the old rocking chair and what she had seen was a quilt that had been haphazardly thrown over the back. She grabbed it, wrapped it around her body like an oversize shawl, and then went into the garage. She pulled back an old rug, raised the trapdoor into the cellar, and went down the steps.

The old familiar smell of mustiness met her when she reached the bottom. She groped around in the dark for the string that would turn on the light. In the process, the wooden thread spool attached to the bottom of the string slapped her right between the eyes. She felt her way over to the cot in the corner, sat down, and waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark.

The rain sounded like golf balls hitting the metal roof. When a tiny flash of light came through the window in the garage and down into the open cellar door, thunder followed behind it immediately. The storm must be moving fast to have gone from ten miles out there to right on top of them in only a few minutes.

She stood up and waited for the next bolt of lightning to tell her where that abominable spool was and finally located it. She gave it a tug, and a low-watt bulb lit up the cellar enough so that she could see the oil lamp over in the corner. Nanny Lucy’s rule was that they were only to use the electricity to find what they needed; then they had to turn it off.