Fiction. Finalist for the 2020 Colorado Book Award for Short Story Collections. APRIL WARNINGS by Mark Pleiss is a collection of short stories that can be read together as one. The narratives are bound by the strange Midwestern ritual of going into an underground tornado shelter and a growing mythology about a particular plot of land on the railroad tracks of the Callahan Ranch in Baxter County. Farms, highways, and churches become the epicenter for truths, fictions, and myths rooted in larger ideas from the so-called "American Heartland," a place belonging to indigenous populations, immigration routes, and beliefs about worlds that exist beyond the prairie.