An Embrace from the Sky



     Frank Martin was a man who had survived, though not truly lived through, being struck by lightning twice.  Newspapers had remarked him as a walking miracle but to look at him you would have instead thought he was the walking dead.  His face was pasty-looking, like there was an extra layer of skin there, and covering that was a consistent layer of sweat and grime.  Most startlingly about him were his pupils which were a mismatched size, his left one being larger than the right, which often gave people a feeling of misbalance and nausea when they looked into them.
 

     The first incident had been on a camping trip with his Cub Scout troop and though the timing could not have been worse, as twenty-two 12-16 year olds had to use the emergency satellite phone to call for help, while Frank’s fellow scout masters gave him CPR, it ultimately became a story that was told in shared laughter and incredulity.  Though Frank joked that the incident left him with a new and most likely brain-damaged induced love for country music, he walked away from the hospital a week later a relatively unchanged man.


     The second lightning strike left him in a different sort of state though.  When he had been caught in a rainstorm while walking the family dog, his son busy with advanced placement math homework at the time, the universe saw fit to strike Frank once more with lightning.  His wife found him seventy-two minutes later when the dog wandered home with its leash still attached and covered in singe marks.  Again, Frank seemed to walk away from the incident unchanged, remarking only a new liking to the taste of relish which he had previously hated.


     This remark though would be the last real thing Frank said that ever made any real sense to his wife or son.  When brought home, Frank saw fit to go straight to his computer and look at the local weather report.  “50% chance of showers, but that’s a conservative estimate at best,” he would say.  Or, “I now have a statistically greater chance of being eaten by a shark.  It’s at least 230% greater!”  Once even to his son, “Our bodies have a .012% chance of collapsing from broad-body hemorrhaging or internal combustion.  Every second increases our odds.”  His alarming behavior perplexed his wife who only stared wordlessly when her husband of 17 years began wrapping all exposed metal in the house with latex sheets he had bought online.


     “Honey, you have to calm down.”


     “I am calm.  I am rational and capable of cogent thought.”


     “Stop being so frantic and look at me.”


     “I’m busy working, we’ll talk when we’re safe.”


     “We are safe!”


     He stopped and looked at her, “You can’t possibly know that.”



     At first Frank had always been a very outdoor-oriented person, one who had no trouble finding the beauty in nature and the wonder of animals.  Now everything was a risk factor, a statistic.  Frank stayed home from work to check every ceiling tile until he was sure there was no tin plating anywhere.  He took down the satellite dish until he was sure all of the parts inside were non-conductive plastic.  The only time he was willing to come down from his work was when he read about dry-lightening phenomena, when without a cloud of warning you could be stricken.  Then he never went back out.


     For every frustration that Frank caused his family though, his wife couldn’t help but pity and despair rather than allow herself to become angry or frustrated because her husband wasn’t just losing his mind.  He was suffering.  When he would be confronted by his limitations in a task, unable to find a way to overcome that probability of lightning strike that seemed so imminent, he would sink into a depression of apocalyptic standard.  “Don’t you see,” he would say, “we’re just so powerless.”
 

     The walls were in tatters as copper wiring had been stripped from them, vacuum sealed in garment bags and buried in the front yard.  Not that the bags could be used for clothing anymore as the brass coat hanger poles in all of the closets of the house and had been torn out and thrown away.
 

     Frank’s marriage lasted for a while like this until his wife eventually realized he could not be reasoned with.  Stressed and out of her wits, the poor woman sought psychologists, statisticians, mathematicians, priests, anyone of authority who could help.  But what answer could they offer?  When a man of authority says, “That’s the way the world is,” it serves little comfort to a man who the world has seen fit to reach toward and strike against. 


     The breaking point for her though was when she came home to find her Frank banging on the bathroom door, his head completely shaven, screaming for their son.


     “At least compromise with me!  Blonde hair is 2/3 more conductive than brown!  At least have the sense to dye it!”


     Throughout all of this, Frank never considered himself insane.  Not even when his wife left during the day, while he was sleeping, leaving a note and some information on the counter.  He didn’t even bother with the note because he knew what it said.  Frank fully appreciated and embraced the fact that he had gone completely mad.  But the world had gone mad on him first.


     He just wanted to ask why?  What greater force saw fit to strike him down with the most terrifying and divine force, not once, but twice?  Because if it wasn’t a greater being, if there was no God and it was all random probability, and the statistics were to be believed that by simply being struck by lightning he had increased his chances exponentially of being struck again, if the explanation was one of simple mathematical probability and interpretation of rational data and evidence, how could he continue on in this world without fear of his now gargantuan state of lightning-struck possibility?  How could he face this world that operated with such abjectly cruel reasoning? 


       He was but a human being, flinching in the face of ultimate power.


    Frank sobbed in between bouts of drilling as he fastened repurposed roof shingles and computer desk chair screws together into a small catwalk.  Built off of the highest point of his house, the small balcony walkaway would be able to see across the little cul-de-sac and out into the forest for miles.  What a glorious sight that should have been to behold.
 

     The platform creaked and shook under Frank’s weight and the wind pummeling against it.  It was sure to break any moment but lightning struck in less than a moment.  It needed only a microsecond for its entire being to embrace you.  It wasn’t slow and painful like fear or life, dragging out its existence needlessly.  It was only around so long so as to exist.
 

     Standing naked and vulnerable, revealing the marks of love, of discolored flesh across his chest and back to the world, covered only by the silver-conductive ring on his left hand, Frank readied himself for the return.  He was going to return to the truth, away from the falsity of prolonging the inevitable.
 

     “I won’t look away this time!  I-I won’t be afraid anymore!” Frank shouted into the wind, the haphazard catwalk cracking.  “I can’t deny you any longer.  Take me!  Take me now!  Take me now!  Take me now!  Take me-”