"YOUR MOM IS A PINEAPPLE EXPRESS

BY DAWN TASAKA STEFFLER

SEVERE WEATHER ALERT… The National Weather Service has extended the Winter Storm Warning due to another round of atmospheric rivers that will impact the region with life-threatening weather conditions, including but not limited to excessive rainfall, crying, flash floods, high winds, and alternating periods of your mom pretending nothing is wrong, and your mom giving you the cold shoulder. 

* WHAT… A potent control pattern is tapping into a moist subtropical fear of being exposed to Covid. This will impact the holidays when your mother discovers your sister-in-law and her boisterous family of six are visiting from the mainland and have been invited to join your family for Thanksgiving. This system will result in your mother boycotting dinner and spending Thanksgiving completely alone now that your dad is gone. Local creeks, seething and sulking will likely exceed flood stage and extensive playing-the-victim is anticipated.

* WHEN… Forecast applies to the Thanksgiving holiday weekend but will likely extend through the end of the year, potentially increasing in intensity just before the Christmas holiday.

* IMPACTS… Strong, gusty words may bring down trees and power lines. Widespread power outages are expected. Roadways will be extra slick making communication difficult to impossible. Do not drive through flooded egos. Water depth and road conditions may be unsafe. Localized ponding is likely in low-lying arguments and areas of historically saturated soils, like on the day of your wedding when you and your sister spent hours in your hotel suite drinking champagne and doing each other’s hair and make-up, while your mom claimed she was just dandy hanging out with your dad in their own room with her Oprah and her sudoku, but actually she was working herself up into a tizzy, waiting for an invitation that never came, imagining all the fun her daughters were having without her, all because she didn’t have the balls to just knock on the door of your suite, and so right before everyone was supposed to leave for the church, your mom turned into a wailing, sobbing mess and your poor then-fiancee had no choice but to chase her around the property, finally catching up to her at the towel stand by the pool, and he tried to comfort her, but she’s not a hugger. Besides, she wanted you to be the one to comfort her, not him. &&

Dawn Tasaka Steffler is a fiction writer from Hawaii who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and she loves a good storm. She is a Smokelong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow, a Best of the Net nominee, and won First Prize in the Bath Flash Fiction Award. Her work appears in Many Nice Donkeys, Stanchion, Ghost Parachute, and others. Find her on Instagram, Twitter and Bluesky @DawnSteffler