Perennial

"In the morning, he reads about the tornados. They touched down in Kansas, several hundred miles away. The air swelled and burst, forming a cyclone that from a distance looked clean as a pipe. Children tucked their heads between their knees in school basements, hundreds lost their homes. Everything around us just flattened and now my yard looks like a trash heap; the tub is in the kitchen and the kitchen curtains are in the trees, a local woman named Cassandra says. In one of the black-and-white photos of the devastation, he sees, remarkably, their same table lamp, slanted against the plastic slide of a jungle gym. He looks up to tell his wife, but of course, she is not there."

"Perennial" was published in Ploughshares, and was the recipient of their 2017 Emerging Writer Award for Fiction. It's about an abandoned car and tulips. To read the full story, visit their site.