lightning girl

a short story

The thunder broke open over my ears like a bomb, splintering shards of noise.

She took longer than I did to fall. The air stunk of sulfur, dank and heavy like rotting, burning bodies. The force of thunder receded as quickly as the damage done. Time sped to catch up.

Thea doesn’t remember. Not that she remembers anything now, but I do: The sky above a cauldron of darkness, no rain yet but the hill, the cornfields around us, swirling with black wind. Ozone heavy inside my lungs. Head ringing with the low pressure.

I saw it then, the truth of what I’d learned in Mr. Schill’s science class: light travels faster than sound. The nymph of fire rippled upward through the soil underneath Thea’s left sneaker. The shockwave traveled, snapping wrinkles from her white dress, out of her right hand, stretched to the roiling thunderhead as if she were a bird about to rise into the air with the crack of light. The whip flashed off into nothingness and she collapsed.

I dusted myself off, blood opening and closing my hungry-mouthed veins, and stood up. Thea lay prostrate between two shoulder-high stalks of corn. Her hair, straight and black as unlit glass, had broken out of its pony and lay in a sheer veil across her face. I rushed over to her and knelt, my hand heavy…