Trapped Lightning

Bella Guillamondegui

her weather is the kind where she can feel the tension. she can feel the rain in her bones before it comes, see it in the soul of the sky first nestled on the horizon, then covering the day like a blanket drenched in tears, but still it doesn't rain.

and she can hear her footfalls, her shoes connecting with the pavement, she can hear them better when the air is heavy like that. that soft sound breaks the air over and over and the deep humidity kisses her on each cheek, without fail.

when it's getting darker by the minute, she can feel the storm in more than her bones now. she can feel it in her fingertips. she can’t go inside then: it’s a part of her— her footfalls getting louder, her breath coming faster, her heart rolling like thunder, and the thickness in the air biting into her cheeks. but someone takes her hand. their warm sunlight swaddles her, the opposite of a shiver passes through her and she watches the first raindrops roll down the other side of the windowpane, the sobbing sky, as lightning rips the world in half.

If you had told Elias Henderson several weeks beforehand that his last meal was to be cold oatmeal and stale crackers, he would have shuddered at the thought of such a fate, and subsequently told you to perhaps lay off of the alcohol for a time, because you sounded positively incoherent. If you had, however, informed him of such a prediction after the fact of his demise, he would have been completely unfazed for two chief reasons.

Firstly, as his parents and Sunday school teachers would discover soon after his birth, Elias was not nearly as avid a student of the Bible and other superstitions he lumped into that category (including but not limited to ghosts, knocking on wood, and regular consumption of cabbage) as of facts and logic. Someone who knew him statistically had to make that prediction, and of course you were telling him of the one correct prediction instead of the many hundreds of incorrect ones, for no one ever cares about the incorrect ones.

Secondly, these odds were greatly skewed by the fact that cold oatmeal and stale crackers had wormed their way into his daily routine whenever he didn’t have time to cook, which was practically every day and night. Accounting for his age, height, and various genetic cardiac conditions, this put the odds of this unfortunate culinary occurrence at precisely 19.082%. Not a very impressive prediction at all, he would think. Of course, Elias Henderson wouldn’t currently think of any of this. He wouldn’t be able to think of anything at all. In his defense, he was dead.

Looking at his body now, though, you’d never know it. Although his face did have a certain unsettling pallor to it, that was more a product of his lifestyle than anything else. Nestled in a vast expanse of white sand in a flashy—albeit rumpled—suit, Elias’s inert form could have simply been asleep. And now, rude as Elias’s earthly self may have considered it, it was time to wake him up. At this, the mounds of sand surrounding me began to stir, and rose in a lazy arc to settle into a vaguely anthropomorphic haze. I focused my energy and searched through the man’s subconscious. Images flashed by: black robes, skeletal forms, evilly glinting scythes. Not a very original take, but it would do well enough. With little effort, I finally drew the sand into a very passable recreation of the figure known as the Grim Reaper. I had never quite understood how such an imposing idol could truly be the most psychologically easy for most people to process, but then again, such mental quirks weren’t in my department, both literally and figuratively. That does, of course, raise the problem of why my tendency to ask these questions exists in the first place. After all, I am really not much more than a glorified marionette created to perfectly execute a function.

My reverie was untimely broken by a snaking bolt of lightning that seemed to come out of nowhere to hit the ground with an ear-shattering boom. When the smoke cleared from my eye sockets, I saw the white-hot sizzle had turned the surrounding sand into a jagged pillar of obsidian glass. Its surface seemed almost polished, and seemed to glow with the reflected light of the blinding white void that stretched above. The sand and the sky mirrored each other in perfect, endless harmony. It was indeed endless as far as I knew, because, though the difference was imperceptible to human eyes, the horizon was missing Earth’s signature slight curvature. With a lazy gesture from my current corporeal hand, a wave of undamaged grains enveloped the glass’s surface, submerging it in the blink of an eye. Distraction removed, I turned back to Elias. As much as I disliked these brusque reminders, the office was right: I was getting off schedule. Even here, a place beyond time, I was never allowed to waste it.