All my family came over and sat in the living room to watch the storm that weekend. I set up a metal rod in the front yard to redirect the strikes near my house. I sat there all night and made up stories of what my grandpa did when he was young.
Heat lightning skin#
My clothes clung to my pebbled skin as I listened to the pitter-patter rain hit the roof. I drove home and sat in my living room in my wet clothes. I cried more than I ever had until my body wrung itself clean out. I let myself cry then, under the cover of rain. People peeled off, cold and shivering, getting in their cars and squealing away. I wanted to celebrate but didn’t have the heart to muster it.
Heat lightning how to#
We had been waiting for the rain so long we didn’t know how to react. It pounded away at Grandpa’s ashes and carried him off in little rivulets. The rain came after a while, swift and punishing. I watched the wind whisk away parts of my grandpa. Grandpa had been cremated so my uncle spread him out on the dry ground. The tops of the wooden posts were exploded, scarred black. They say lightning won’t strike the same place twice.
There wasn’t much there-some scrub brush, a section of an old fence, rusty barbed wire snaking around the pockmarked slats. We met up on the side of the road where Grandpa had died. I nodded so that they’d think they helped me identify something. People kept throwing the same words at me. It hurt more than I expected because I had never admitted to myself that he might die.
But I loved him with my whole damn heart, and he took on that love whenever I came around. We had nothing in common, really, and I had never been one to pen a letter with no one to hand it off to. I tried praying, long drives, and even watching his old VHS movies. I had no steadfast ritual to get rid of the pain that cradled my heart like a sickly newborn. We were young so he made sure it was a light beer. He taught my cousins and me how to fight with a heavy bag and wrapped knuckles and the reward of a warm beer at the end of it. He found a way to treasure everyone in this kingdom of insects and wind and tire swings. He was the only good one in my family, Grandpa, although none of us had been there to watch him grow up. The mortician, my aunt’s ex, said he must have had a heart attack, surprised at the sudden jolt. The sheriff said it was impossible for lightning to hit you in a car-something about the rubber tires passing the charge off to the ground. It happened while he was driving his car, a 1987 Buick Lesabre that damn near crawled on the ground.
In the dry fields of Iowa, we discovered the scarecrow had raised his hands to the sky, shocked or asking for deliverance. We fell to our knees more as the days passed and prayed out of convenience. A bolt ran straight down the chimney of our pastor and missed his youngest daughter by a yard as it shot across the living room. Our belly buttons grew staticky and our necks grew strained from craning up. My aunt, who hadn’t been well in years, tried to knock the clouds out of the sky with a broom. The dark blockade of clouds seemed to sink to just above our heads, lightning skittering across their undersides. The storm would leave, the sky scrubbed clean to antiseptic blue, but it always returned. I wondered if bone could conduct electricity. She fell asleep with her shin resting on top of mine. “I think I’d marry you right at this moment,” I told her. The thunder followed, booming, shaking the thin drywall foundation. We tucked our hands in each other’s hoodie pockets and found a breathing rhythm. I found an old girlfriend who let me sleep in the same bed as her. The storm continued into the night, the flash-bang of lightning and thunder, the empty pocket of space we all prayed rain would fill. “Dry thunderstorm,” my cousin’s boyfriend called it. We walked outside to a blue-black sky and imploding thunder. I’ve been trying to leave them for years but I’m a loser myself.
My family can’t help but embarrass ourselves. We played until my grandma started cursing at the pins, strolling out into the lane, and they kicked us out. When the lightning storms first started we turned to bowling-a nice, grounded sport where the ball rarely left the floor and the shoes felt insulated.
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