MARCH 28, 2020. An EF3 tornado touched down for 16 minutes and for 12.5 miles destroyed everything in its path, including the Turtle Creek Mall.

It was the first time that this city had been featured on national news, but no one wanted to speak. The damage spoke for itself. It was as if the building were run through a mandoline slicer—caved-in ceilings, exposed pipe, and criss-crossing metal frames that held up nothing.

“I don’t know if the fountain of the spitting turtle in the food court was ever meant to be a wishing fountain, but the water was always peppered with spare change, begged from mommas everywhere,” said one resident, “We didn’t go very often—just holidays, sometimes on a weekend—but everytime I passed the fountain, I would turn to my mom, who was already digging out a quarter, and we would both toss a coin into the cold water to hear it plop. She’d ask, What’d you wish for? and I would smile and say that it was a secret.”

(She considers digging through the rubble for the fountain that she saw maybe ten years ago, and she imagines herself uncovering him—though many others had looked, she wants to be the one to recover her forgotten friend—but she only comes up with his head, cleanly cut from the rest of his body, the hole in his beak where the water would come out the only blemish on his aged turtle head. She sees herself holding the turtle head, the emblem of her childhood belief that none of this would ever end, looking over her shoulders to make sure no one is watching, and tucking it within her bag. She would bury it at her childhood home in a cardboard box, beside her childhood pets.)

“What did you wish for?” we asked her.

“I never did wish for anything—I just wanted to toss in a coin.”

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Image: “Stripped” by Alex J. Tunney