Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • The Paris Review

    On Warnings

    by Hanif Abdurraqib Jul 15, 2019 9 minutes

    Still from Belly (1998)

    It is hard to say when I stopped noticing the sirens. They’re still there, piercing the otherwise normal Wednesday-afternoon noise. But I haven’t noticed them for at least fifteen years. In the central Ohio area, a test of the state’s tornado-siren system takes place every Wednesday at noon. I would describe the sound for you, but even now I can barely remember it. I recall it beginning as a low whistle that bends into a loud howl, but the sound feels distant to me now. It’s indistinguishable from all the other ways this city rumbles its way toward productivity.

    When I was a kid in elementary school, I assumed the siren tests happened everywhere. Twice a month, at noon, when the howling began to announce itself, all of us kids spilled into the hallway, and sat on our knees facing the wall. We’d lock one of our hands into the other, put them behind our heads, and curl ourselves downward. It was practice for the actual tornado, which we were told might come at any moment. It might come while we were in our classrooms learning whatever it is elementary school kids learned in the nineties (yet another thing I don’t recall). I never knew this was something exclusive to my school, or schools in my area. I imagined an entire chain of balled-up bodies, trembling against walls in school hallways across the country.

    Once I hit my

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from The Paris Review

    The Paris Review35 min read
    An Eye In The Throat
    My father answers the phone. He is twenty-three years old, and, as everyone does in the nineties, he picks up the receiver without knowing who is calling. People call all day long, and my parents pick up and say, “Hello?” and then people say, “It’s C
    The Paris Review32 min read
    The Art of Poetry No. 116
    Alice Notley lives in a studio apartment up a single flight of stairs, on the Right Bank in Paris. Her front door is labeled with her name, in looped handwriting on Scotch tape. The small kitchen, which I saw used only for the making of espresso, lea
    The Paris Review1 min read
    Farah Al Qasimi
    Farah Al Qasimi’s first photographs were of the dreary New Haven winter: reflections in water, a dead cat, an angry dog. She was an undergraduate at the Yale School of Art, where in 2017 she also received her M.F.A. Since then, Al Qasimi has turned h

    Related Books & Audiobooks