Thunderstorms
Outside the noise of the approaching storm heightened, but my Sunshine was oblivious to it, absorbed in the remembrance of being crowned Junior Miss El Vado. While her monologue flowed a small puddle grew around her drink. Fed as though by a spring, it eventually branched and trickled across the finished maple tabletop to the plate of cookies, surrounded the centerpiece basket of wooden fruit like a moat, and began to make its way toward the widening pond around my own glass. By the time they met near the bowl of fruit cocktail she had steered the course of conversation from her sainted mother back to the baby, saying that if it was a girl she would name her Marie, after her late grandparent. But she avoided airing her pre-natal concerns, just as she somehow averted her eyes from the swamp that was slowly rising across the table. I thought of how again to gently raise the subject of the baby’s health, distracted though I was by the prodigious fountains our lemonade glasses made, for I believed it important to know what she felt, especially if it came to the worst. Just as I began to speak, though, several things happened. The water found its way to the table’s edge and into her lap. She looked down, then up, as if the ceiling were leaking, then reached for her glass and saw, at the moment the first great flash of lightning exploded outside the window, where the water had come from.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, grasping her glass and staring with amazement as the water ran down her hand. The crash of thunder preceded by only a split second the crash of her glass as it slipped from her hand and shattered on the floor. The big raindrops, cousins of the dew condensed by our cups, began to pelt the windows, and the wind unleashed its full fury. We opened the crepe curtains and saw the hanging earthenware planters swing wildly about, the picnic benches falling over. Trees bent and bowed low, as if either in humble homage to the storm or an effort to duck it. Water quickly pooled in every hole and rut, spilled over until every square meter under the lights was submerged beneath a miniature seascape peppered constantly by liquid bullets. Thunder roared and smashed the very air in our ears and lungs with each impact. But it was the lightning I found so enthralling, twisting and forking across the sky in strokes more brilliant than even daylight under the Regulus effect, illuminating everything in stop-action, like the rapid fire of many flashbulbs. The conflagration even elicited the respect of Christine, who usually slept through the thunderstorms in Chicago, and was otherwise put out by the estrangement they forced between her and the heavens. She peered over my shoulder in silence, all thought of Gregg, the drowning glass or names for the baby forgotten. The window quickly fogged over from our breath, but we continued to stare dumbly, not even stepping back when a deafening clap shook the panes like the head of a bass drum. It was through this steamy soft focus that I began to notice subtle variations in the color of each lightning flash, deviating from deathly white to a glare tinged with violet or electric blue. At first I was certain that she saw it before I did, and that was why she became so enchanted. Her chin pressed harder into my shoulder and her round stomach interfaced with the small of my back as the colors descended the spectrum, reverberating with the longer wavelengths of magenta, cyan and green. I thought of Ben’s nostalgia as he leafed through his old photographs and observed that the years had attained, to his eye, distinctive hues. As the lightning shifted to yellow and orange, creating a sort of stroboscopic sunset effect, I understood that the illusion could be reduced from years to fractions of a second, and that such moments could irrevocably change one’s life forever.
“Can you see it?” I asked, breathless with rising passion, feeling for the first time how the light could have moved Karen, Christine, and even Ben, to do the things they did. But my rapture passed without a word from her, and before the lightning gave three final brilliant blood-red flashes and the rain subsided she had left my side. Reseating herself at the table, she complained of a chill and asked if there was any wood for the fireplace.
***
Up on the ridge I took comfort in the unspeakable beauty of the night. All the land about was caught up in a game of dodge, appearing and disappearing as the clouds raced past the Moon and the lightning flashed. I kept my ears at the ready to catch the first sound of wheels turning on the highway, remembering what Christine said. If Gregg were really out there it would be the perfect moment to step forward and reclaim what he once thought was his. But nothing broke the silence between the thunder except the stream rushing from the shadowland canyon. The seat of my pants was becoming uncomfortably damp from the rain-washed boulder, and upon rising I experienced a rush and my vision faded for the space of a few palpitating heartbeats. The lightning to the east then took on an orange hue which persisted even after my dizziness cleared and which I mistook for the sunrise, as the Moon was near to setting. The colors did not signal the arrival of the Sun—and Regulus—on the Appalachian horizon, though, just that infernal, free-spirited electricity playing one more trick on me. This time, however, the flashes did not jump around the spectrum with gaudy Fourth of July abandon, but shifted slowly and steadily to red, like a dying fire, and as if in sympathy the air turned cold. I watched breathlessly across the valley while the show lasted, until the strokes attained the color of blood and faded from view. I knew the lightning was still there because I could hear the thunder, but the Nova Phenomenon had never blessed any of us with the gift of seeing in infra-red. In that darkest hour before the dawn I was overcome by the sensation of the Earth’s true age—terribly old, old beyond measure, and more than a little tired, too—and yet she kept going, both driven and tempered by her birthstar through endless cycles of cleansing and restoration, twisting the scheme just the tiniest bit each time so the story could make a new beginning. And so it began again. The eastern sky threw off its raiment of clouds and, unveiled, blushed, black to azure to rose. The flowers opened their rain-bonnets to perfume the air and awaken the bees for breakfast. The birds sang in mockery of the mutants’ choir. In the midst of this revelry Capella’s cries reached me from the open door below, and I descended the ridge by the light of the quickening day to see what all the fuss was about.
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