Lightning

Thelma, who had called only days before to report the good news that she had decided to marry Jason Gaines, called again at seven-fifteen that evening, just to chat, as if she were unaware of the importance of the date. Laura took the call in her office, where she was still struggling with the bile-black book that had occupied her for the past year.

“Hey, Shane, guess what? I met Paul McCartney”! He was in LA to negotiate a recording contract, and we were at the same parts Friday night. When I first saw him, he was stuffing an hors d’oeuvre in his mouth, he said hello, he had crumbs on his lip, and he was gorgeous. He said he’d seen my movies, thought I was very good, and we talked—you believe this?—we must’ve chatted twenty minutes, and gradually the strangest thing happened.”

“You discovered that you’d undressed him while you were talking.”

“Well, he still looks very good, you know, still that cherub face we swooned over twenty years ago but marked now by experience tres sophisticated and with an extremely appealing touch of sadness about his eyes, and he was enormously amusing and charming. At first maybe I did want to tear his clothes off, yeah, and live out the fantasy at last. But then the longer we talked, the less he seemed like a god, the more he seemed like a person, and in minutes, Shane, the myth evaporated, and he was just this very nice, attractive, middle-aged man. Now what do you make of that?”

“What am I supposed to make of it?”

“I don’t know,” Thelma said. “I’m a little disturbed. Shouldn’t a living legend continue to awe you longer than twenty minutes after you meet him? I mean, I’ve met lots of stars by now, and none of them have remained godlike, but this was McCartney.”

“Well, if you want my opinion, his swift loss of mythological stature says nothing negative about him, but it says plenty positive about you. You’ve achieved a new maturity, Ackerson.”

“Does this mean I’ve got to give up watching old Three Stooges movies every Saturday morning?”

“The Stooges are permitted, but food fights are definitely a thing of the past for you.”

By the time Thelma hung up at ten minutes till eight, Laura was feeling slightly better, so she switched from the bile-black book to the tale about Sir Tommy Toad. She had written only two sentences of the children’s story when the night beyond the windows was lit by a bolt of lightning bright enough to spark dire thoughts of nuclear holocaust. The subsequent thunderclap shook the house from roof to foundation, as if a wrecker’s ball had slammed into one of the walls. She came to her feet with a start, so surprised that she did not even hit the “save” key on the computer. A second bolt seared the night, making the windows as luminous as television screens, and the thunder that followed was louder than the first explosion.

“Mom!”

She turned and saw Chris standing in the doorway. “It’s okay,” she said. He ran to her. She sat in the spring-backed armchair and pulled him onto her lap. “It’s all right. Don’t be afraid, honey.”

“But it’s not raining,” he said. “Why’s it booming like that if it’s not raining?”

Outside, an incredible series of lightning bolts and overlapping thunderclaps continued for nearly a minute, then subsided. The power of the event had been so great, Laura was able to imagine in the morning they would find the broken sky lying about in huge chunks like fragments of a giant eggshell.

Before he walked five minutes from the clearing in which he had arrived, Stefan was forced to pause and lean against the thick trunk of a pine whose branches began just above his head. The pain of his wound wrung streams of sweat from him, yet he was shivering in the bitter January cold, too dizzy to stand up, yet terrified of sitting down and falling into an endless sleep. With the drooping boughs :hat mammoth pine overhead and all around, he felt as if he had taken refuge under Death’s black robe, from which he might not emerge..

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