The first time my mother learned how lightning loved her, it came through our TV. The light reached out and cupped her breasts, holding her for a minute before spilling into her belly, which lit up like a bulb. That’s when we saw it—something curled there, stone-still, like a child carried too long. I called it regret, but my sister said she didn’t believe in such sentimental things.
We watched my father’s touch grow brittle after that, chipping little by little against my mother’s cheeks, and withdrawing completely after the second storm, when light soaked through her hair in gray swaths and painted her fingernails white as eggshells. It became hard to say who in our house was more haunted.
I was tapped twice: on the shoulder, on the hip, a finger of light. Twice it pulled me out like a fish from the ice, and twice I was thrown back to my body, a cradle of bone. I told my sister that it felt like a sudden loosening, a seal opening somewhere inside me. Then that familiar tickle of liquid seeping down my thigh, like life sieving right through me. She said I shouldn’t tell such stories.
But only after my daughter was struck, and walked out of it as out of a lake—resplendent, blinking the static from her eye, shaking drops of lightning off her tiny hands—were we certain. Conductivity, the textbooks called it, the easiest path down to the earth. Bad luck is what my father said—to be loved by a force like that. Every storm was a prayer, then silence, a fear of last words in the air. Eventually, he left us. My sister, too—for the desert. I wasn’t surprised when my own husband vanished, terrified or simply tired of sharing his bed with our brand of death. You could smell it like smoke on our breath.
My mother’s skin had become translucent by then, and I could see a clearing burned inside her where regret used to sit. It was then I understood a woman’s body as a bowl, open to whatever may fall into it. But loss is a choice, she said, to become the haunt you’ve run from.
This story originally appeared in and has been reprinted with permission of the author. Rochelle’s book, The Rusted City, was published this year by :
