The Moments Between Lightning
A door bursts open and slams into the wall. My little sisters and cousins flood the room with yelling excited voices so loud the room spins like a kamikaze. Talking about there’s gonna be lightning, there’s gonna be rain, let’s go to the tire swing above the dried up river bank.
Maybe there will be a river tonight. We run barefoot across slippery blades of grass. We are tarzan children doing flips on the trampoline, boomeranging into electric air, daring the sky to catch us. We are birds sitting on a line staring at the sky, waiting for something to change, waiting for something to cause us to flutter.
My sister turns to me and says, “We won’t really get struck, will we?” No, I say, it hasn’t even started yet. I don’t mention the daydreams about what magical gifts and superpowers I’d acquire if it did happen however, like the gifts our brother has. Right now, he’s squatting down in the mud, barefoot, creating mounds and his mind sees nothing but potential. His obsession is uncarving the extraordinary he sees from the mundane that most of us cannot see past. Our brother is something of a savant when it comes to clay. The very first thing he ever sculpted was Winnie the Pooh climbing up the tree with stunning accuracy, demonstrating his exceptional memory. He was four years old at the time. My friends ask me why he doesn’t talk, if he understands me. I say he doesn’t need to talk to understand me. I say he sees more than we do. I say that because of the details in what he sculpts: the roughness of the bark, the twist of the branches, his fingerprint pressed into the clay.
Eventually we get called inside, told to hurry. It’s time to go home. Say goodbye to your cousins, kiss your grandma. It’s a long drive home filled with six hours of staring at open fields, windmills, oil rigs, and bathroom stops on the side of a red dirt road. Mom replays a Maroon 5 CD on the stereo singing, “Clouds are shrouding us in moments unforgettable.” My sister and I want Nelly Furtado, banding together to vote out the other three siblings, singing offkey, “I’m like a bird, I’ll only fly away.” The words vibrate off my tongue, sweet like foreign fruit I’ve never tasted, away from this dry, tumbleweed land. We arrive home to a red brick house and endless views of barbed wire and horses, interrupted by a single strand of neighboring houses. I walk inside to the familiar smell of home: wood floors and old, worn leather couches intermingled with the smell of newly painted walls.
We start to unpack. A voice causes the wall before me to vibrate and the pace of my heart to quicken. A door bursts open and slams into the wall. Yelling voices so loud the room spins like a kamikaze. Talking about there’s gonna be lightning, there’s gonna be rain. Maybe there will be a river tonight. A crash booms, a voice cries, and I know this sound like the back of my hand, like storm scrying. I gather my three youngest siblings, tell them to be quicker than the lightning, “go, get outside.” Our oldest sister stays behind, a role that is only hers. We all know this drill, having practiced storm
safety so many times before. We run to the backyard and stay there and wait for it to pass. It rains from our faces and the ground is wet. My sweet brother begins to sink his hands in the mud beneath us. At first, it is just a mound. But he sees the extraordinary. His hands push the mud into an upward spiral, unfurling into the sky as if we were just tiny fae creatures. He creates barks and twists, branches that pretzel in many different directions with flowers and leaves blooming in milliseconds. His fingerprints bring this creation to life, his creation expanding into the sky like a timelapse of spring. A hole appears at the base of the tree. He goes in first and we follow, making our way up the tree with our brother as our guide. When we get to the top, home is simply a dot on Earth, a faraway star whose stories are lightyears away. Untouchable, the four of us sit on a branch, perched like birds. We dream of
wings and the day we get to take our maiden flight. Until that long-awaited day, we stay together and stare at the clouded sky. Waiting for lightning. Waiting for something to change.