Snow Lightning

Pa said a storm was coming. He was right. 

It swept over the farm fast, like a blanket tossed across our acreage by the mighty hand of the Lord. The windpump by the porch started spinning, its blades whirring loud as Pa’s machine when it reaps the grain. 

I stayed inside. I always stay inside.

Ma said I ought to help out more, but I told her that’s what Levi is for, or else why does he stay here and not go off to school like the other boys in town. Ma didn’t say anything after that. 

The snow begins to fall, silent but heavy, powdering the ground and the barn and the trees with a fine layer of white dust. The wind keeps howling by my window, rattling the glass as I press my face against it. The storm is violent, rageful, knocking its fists against the dirt with thunderous blasts. A tempest. 

Charlotte said I am tempestuous. I laughed and asked where such a small girl learned such a big word, but she bounded away without an answer. She runs now, too, afraid of the lightning as it crashes down upon the field, illuminating the plains as they stretch out around us into a vast nothingness. 

It is hot in this house. Too hot, too small, too filled to the brim with Ma and Pa and Levi and Charlotte and Me and nowhere for us to go but the nothingness that is vast and unbounded and empty. I rise from the windowsill, filled with a simmering heat in my chest that demands quenching, demands sweet release like the Great Flood He set upon the world.

I don’t know where I’m going. I feel myself move. Out of my room. Out of the house. Out of the fence Pa built when I was 9 to keep me from running into the fields while he was tilling. But it can’t stop me now. 

I rip at my shirt, pulling wildly as I run, remembering Joseph’s hands as they once pulled wildly too. The buttons fly off, and I throw it behind me, pushing through the stalks of wheat like a predator on the hunt. I am still too hot, skin burning, melting the flakes of snow as they land upon my flesh. I pull my jeans off, tossing the denim away, my cotton drawers too, and I collapse to the ground. 

I lie there, flat upon the earth, naked as the day I came into this world, staring up at the clouds as the ice crystals cool my skin. Lightning strikes the ground, the air crackling around me with the faint hum of electricity. It is a fiery reckoning from the heavens brought down by Him. Because of me. 

I knew when I kissed Joseph that God would be angry. That I shouldn’t have done it. But I wanted to. My body wanted to. There was a heat. It pulled me toward him. And he didn’t back away either. He just kissed me, in the dark, our bodies burning like the firewood Levi chopped every winter. 

And now He is angry at me. I know it. Snow lightning, he sends. The frost to chill my unquenchable heat, and the lightning to turn me to ashes as the soil reclaims me. I close my eyes, ready for his wrath, ready to be taken while the snow hisses to steam upon my skin. 

A flash illuminates the sky, and through my lids I see what is surely the end of me. It approaches, almost in slow motion, descending from the clouds towards me like a spear tossed by a steady hand. I feel the heat as it radiates through the field, but it is strange how cool my body feels. I did not expect fire to be this cold. I open my eyes, desperate to catch one last glimpse of this place that was my home before I am banished from it forever. 

But I am not on fire. I am unharmed, untouched by the lightning storm. The cool touch of the snow is all I feel now, and the coarseness of the dirt beneath me. A laugh escapes my throat, wild and free and frenzied. If He wanted me dead He could’ve struck me down where I lay, but He did not. He has made His will known, made it clear that my heat is His heat, that every fire that burns is one of His creation. 

I begin to run. This time I know where. To the darkness where our heat met and our lips touched. To the fire that he lit but had always flickered inside me. To the place that doesn’t belong to us but will always be ours. 

To Joseph.