She sat with her curtains pulled against the rain and the darkened visage of the sky as heavy drops pelted her windows and wind lashed the storm in streaks along the sides of her home. Her light was from candles, nothing attached by wires to the potential of sparking death and brilliant light. Her rooms were silent and dark, and she huddled in a shawl her grandmother had knitted almost a hundred years in the past, rocking in the chair her mother had rocked her in so many long, silent nights of her childhood, watching the darkness.
He sat on his front porch and stared at rocking, candle-cast shadows through her drapes. Beside him on an old cast iron table sat his father’s radio. It was tuned to the game, the Chicago Cubs vs. The St. Louis Cardinals. Static burst between plays and squawked into the night. The cord of the radio snaked back into an ancient exterior socket on the front wall of his house. Rain misted from the street and his yard, gathered on the old insulated plastic and ran in slow rivulets toward the shielded source of his play-by-play.
Lightning backlit the clouds and streaked them in deep purples and flickering lavender trails. In his hair stray flickers of silver gray glistened in the brilliance.
He watched the lightning in the periphery of his vision.
She saw it only as a brief illumination of her curtains. She tucked the shawl more tightly around her thin shoulders.
He blinked, waited patiently for the static to clear and smiled as Zambrano threw a slider on a three two count and struck out the side. Bottom of the eighth and he didn’t know her name.
The wind picked up, sending leaves spattering down the sidewalk in wet whirlwinds, their rhythm like the footsteps of some great, demented creature with damp feet and a dizzy mind. Trees bent under that wild breath, and the voice of the world roared in the background. He reached over and turned up the volume on the radio. Sosa was coming to the plate, one out, and a man on first. Scoring position.
A branch lifted from the damp earth and danced in the air, scoring the ground and drawing lunatic symbols in the mud before whipping up and away. The tramping leaves washed over the symbols, blotting them from existence as the count rose to two and two.
His mind drifted along the line, threatening foul. On a sunny day, she would be in the flowerbed beside her walk, her hair tied back in a scarf that called to him from the re-run television screens of his memory and spoke of pies cooling in the window and fresh, laundered sheets. There were hopscotch squares drawn in white chalk, visible even through the rain, at the intersection of her walk and the main sidewalk trailing away to reality.
She heard the frantic fingers of trees scrabbling at her windows and her roof. She heard the whistle of wind through branches and eaves and it shifted in her mind to the voices of children. The laughter so bright and cheerful as they tossed their stones and hopped gracefully from square to square transformed to hungry glee in the throat of the storm. Despite the shawl, she shivered. Despite that it was a game, she feared the hunger in their eyes.
His mind rode the lightning back, flashing to that same radio, a different storm. Ron Santo had played for the cubs in those days, and Sammy Sosa had yet to be born.
Sosa swung on the two-two pitch, and the ball flew foul. The game remained tied, tied to the future, and the past. He scanned the porch across the street, ran his gaze lovingly over the hedge, and the neat rows of Gardenias – she loved the Gardenias. He could tell from the way she worked with them, fingers carefully massaging the topsoil into place around delicate roots. The water and weeds extracted one by one and gathered in her apron, never left to grow and drain the soil. The same apron her mother had worn.
She glanced through the crack where her curtains met in the centre. A dark cloud flashed like photo powder against a silvered reflector, and a thin line of brilliance lanced from the centre. The tallest point on her house was the lightning rod. She pictured its intricate, gothic shape in her mind; smelled the ozone and bitter, brittle taste of electricity, though it had yet to strike. The Path of least resistance beckoned.
The fastball came in slightly high and outside, and Sosa swung. There was a thundering crack as leather met wood and the lightning snaked down its familiar path, sparking on the old iron rod and licking downward. The wire was copper; old as the lightning rod itself was old, buried deep in the home’s roots. Insulation had cracked, and the rain had wound its way relentlessly beneath, eating at the metal and disassembling atomic structure. Bridge out.
The ball rose over the centre field stands and the announcer’s canned baseball voice droned in stock-footage amazement as the home run cleared the scoreboard on its way to the parking lot beyond.
He watched the lightning rod snap to life, saw the white-hot voltage snake downward and branch out.
He sat very still. A thousand nights he’d sat and watched that rod, amazed at it’s ability to flip off the gods and drain their rage impotently to ground. There was an explosion of brilliance and sound near the base of the wire; debris shot off in all directions. Ghost fire licked across the wet ground and flickered over the barren hopscotch square. The corner of her house disintegrated and burst into flame.
She was lifted gently at first, as if in the arms of some great, benevolent mother, reaching out to replace what she had lost. The crash that followed jolted her. Pain cut through the memories and the fear long before realization whispered the truth in her ear. She raised herself to hands and knees as fire devoured the wall at her back and cackled brightly in her ear.
He rose, and he moved. The ozone-scented air stood the hair on his arms on end and rippled across his skin. Behind him the cheers of Chicago fans buzzed and sputtered through the radio’s tinny speaker in competition with large barks of static. Sosa rounded third and headed home.
He slipped and slid down the porch steps and crossed his yard at a run. Water ran in tiny rivers down either side of the road, roaring rapids spilling into the mouths of storm drains. He leaped over the near side torrent, kept his balance by a lucky shift of his weight, and plunged ahead. As he left the ground once more, taking flight toward her sidewalk, her yard – the rows and rows of Gardenias – her door…the wind took up its childish laughter once again and he could have sworn he saw wispy ethereal dancers mincing across the hopscotch square directly in his path.
She crawled shakily away from the heat and clawed her way up to the window’s sill. She glanced through the heavy curtains and cried out in fright, scrambling to her feet. Long legs and wild eyes passed the window so swiftly she feared delirium. She had to get out. She could not bring herself to approach the door. The storm raged. She staggered, dropped to her knees, grabbed the shawl and wrapped it around her thin, shaking shoulders.
He could not make out the voices from his radio as he stepped onto her porch, but he was certain, just for a moment, that he heard applause – or very loud static. Lightning continued to crawl across the sky and lick at the edges of the clouds. The wind had picked up so that its voice was a chorus of moans through aging eaves and down the semi-hollow length of her gutter.
Flames ate inward from the corner of the house, leaping from wood to fabric, curtain to ceiling with mesmerizing swiftness. She clutched the shawl about her like a shield, ignored the fire and watched the window. The world flickered like a chasing Christmas tree light string and thunder growled in hunger to rival the flapping laughter of the flames.
He knocked stupidly on her door. The fire moved far too quickly across the outer walls, and upward. Steam hissed where the cold rain met the rise of the flames. He waited. She did not come, and heat from the blaze rippled around him, forming an impossible dry pocket in the driving wind and rain.
He turned an anguished glance over his shoulder. Through rivulets of water dripping from the eaves of her porch, multiplied through the more familiar rivulets of his own, he saw the radio. The afterglow of a lightning strike faded like indrawn breath, exhaled in a shimmer that washed blue, flickered across the grass, and lashed out. The dancing droplets of moisture running down the old radio’s cord dissipated in a shivered whisper of sound. The radio glowed, just for a second, then exploded in a bright star of glass tubes, dials, and plastic, white-hot at the center and bursting into the storm.
There was no sound. Thunder and the roar of the fire consumed it. He turned slack-jawed to her door, lunged toward it, and banged his fist into the unyielding wood. He wanted her to open it. He wanted it to break. Behind him a small bluish flame danced at the base of the front wall of his home, ignored. Top of the ninth, and no one knew the score. The heat seared the side of his face and his arm.
She heard the knock on her door, and her heart quickened. Something had gone wrong with the lightning. It flickered, but it did not die out between the crashes of thunder and the pounding on her door as lightning was supposed to do. Instead it grew brighter.
With a soft cry, the first sound she’d uttered since the storm broke, she rose and stepped back to the window. Though they were hot now, and their touch burned her fingers, she parted the blinds and stared across the street. A white ball of sparking flame sizzled and popped where his table should have stood. He was not there.
He drew back from the door. Images of her lying prone and helpless on the floor flooded his mind. Images of her hair ablaze and her skin scorched drove into him like spikes. His shoulder caught the old door dead centre, and, legs pumping, he drove his heels into the porch floor. Wood splintered, caught, and gave with a crack that turned his blood to ice because the sound was so like the lightning.
She gasped and whirled at the sound, and he tumbled through her door. She was so close to the flames now that they danced and tickled across the hem of her dress and flicked fire tongues at the wild strands of her hair. He sprang to her, and she watched, transfixed by the sight of him, her lips moving silently in prayer, denial, or something more.
He swept her up in his arms, whirled a final time, and ducked out through her front door, carrying her across the porch and into the rain. In the distance, sirens added their lonely wail to the voices of storm and flame. He wrapped her more tightly in her shawl and stared across the street at his home. The front wall was alive in flames, rapidly mirroring the devastation behind him.
The cold rain washed over her face as he held her easily in his arms, marvelling at her light, delicate weight. He wanted to brush away the drops and smooth her hair, but his arms were full of her, as were his eyes, and he only watched. He watched her, and he watched the fires, and the sirens wound closer, closing on the two in spirals of tightening sound.
Paramedics took her from his arms as rubber clad men yelled and spread out over their homes in hordes.
Yes, he could ride with the ambulance. No, he had no one to call. No one was hurt.
Lightning split the sky a last time as they bundled him into the ambulance, and he heard the squawk of a lone radio from one of the emergency vehicles.
“That ends the inning, and regulation play. It was as sweet a double play as you’ll see in this lifetime. The score is all tied up at two, and this one is going into extra innings.”
The door closed like the snap of jaws over the words. As they pulled away, sirens wailing again, loud and too close, and flashing, multi-colored lights strobing like rapid-fire lightning, the past burned slowly.
STEPHEN KING
MANLY WADE WELLMAN
DEPECHE MODE
CONCRETE BLONDE
