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Lightning

Prologue

By H. A. Kirsch

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Trevor de en Seince was right in the middle of doing something he was absolutely not supposed to do, at least per the moral order of the five chantries set for teenage boys. His new brick-wall and tar-roof home was in something radical called a 'development' right next to Potterston town center, and unlike his countryside childhood home, now he actually had neighbors. One of them was a severe cheetah of the same age who always looked indignant and wore fancy riding clothes even when he was just heading to school. The unusually-gray maned wolf focused on that cheetah - his sour face, his posh and flippant attitude, his expensive leather breeches and always gleaming boots - and enjoyed himself as he lay on his simple bed, huffs and rhythmic ministrations drowned out by the rainstorm outside.

Then everything turned white. Trevor didn't hear the simultaneous thunderclap. He felt a sensation a little like the urgent teenage finish he had been so desperately chasing under his sheets, except this sensation occupied everything in the world, like someone banging on every surface inside of his head all at once.

The next thing he remembered was staring up into a black hole in the middle of his ceiling. The hole was jagged, intermittently filled with more bursts of light and seconds-later thunderclap. Rain streamed down and splattered him in his face, then turned into a torrent of water. He thought it was a dream. Then he thought he was drowning.

His aunt Helena, a snow-white arctic fox, burst shrieking into the room. She grabbed him out of bed and all he thought was, I'm done for. You caught me. I'm a filthy wild animal. They weren't shrieks of anger, though, and soon mixed with hollering from neighbors. He focused his eyes up at the hole; water poured in for real, from the torrent of rain that sluiced off the roof into the opening.

"How can he be alive? It hit him! It hit him!" "Look at that!" "Is that smoke? Is it on fire?" "No, there's too much rain, it has to be steam." Gawkers had crowded into the house and into the room despite his aunt's attempts otherwise, and those with more tact peered through the windows. At least two people scampered around on the roof to try and cover the hole with an oilcloth tarp. Everything in Trevor's chest of drawers had exploded about the room. One of his school books was smoldering. His hurricane lamp's chimney was just a shard of glass amidst a sea of shining splinters and its metal frame.

He rubbed at his face, eyes profuse with tears. He squeezed his right eye shut to wipe it and realized he couldn't see anything out of his other eye beside a red and gray fog sprinkled with the swirls of abstract shape that appeared when squeezing one's eyes shut. He burst out into a yelping wail for real, crying without understanding, and Helena scooped him up in her furry arms.

During the pounding early summer storm, a lightning bolt had struck the house, directly over Trevor's bedroom. It blasted a hole in both the roof and then a few feet down through the attic right through the ceiling, seeking its path to the metal window frame behind his dresser chest and right next to the bed. Trevor had been in the way, and the bolt had hit him in the left side of the head just above his eye. It had blasted his nightshirt into shreds, the violence of the destruction stopping anyone questioning why he had been half undressed already.

The next few days were broken pieces of recollection. He struggled to stay awake, enough that Helena summoned a doctor several times. Yet in sleep, he barely felt like he was truly out, and slipped over and over into fitful and forgetful dreams. His heart pounded and raced, his ears rang and buzzed, he broke into sweats and chills, and it was two weeks before he could stand up without growing dizzy and staggering. The doctors pronounced that he likely survived only because he was at the peak of teenage male growth. I wonder if it's just punishment for thinking about Marshall while touching myself, he thought, putting too much of himself in the idea that others actually cared what teenage boys did whilst thinking about their male neighbors at night. With no one else knowing what he had truly been up to, he eventually put that self-deprecating idea to rest and went on with his young life, much more occupied with the after-effects of the act of nature that struck him.