And So The Lightning Follows

The emptiness of the desert swept past the car in a hazy tan glow. Cactuses and tumbleweeds dotted the landscape, sure to be crawling with lizards and hearty desert insects. Grandma couldn’t live further from a temperate climate than she did now, squandered away in the Arizona sun. The sky was practically a bioluminescent shade of blue, the kind of shade electricity crackled like.

It was another three hours before they reached her small town. The sun was just beginning to set when they finally got to her house, the blood-red and orange blaze cascading over the horizon. JJ hadn’t been back to her grandmother’s house since she was very young, maybe three or four years old, and she didn’t remember much about it. Hazy images of a white blocky building came to mind, surrounded by golden shapes she couldn’t quite recall. Seeing that same dusty building now, she knew what the shapes were.

Thousands of bright yellow marigolds surrounded the property. They lined the driveway, the path up to the doorway too. They stretched twenty or thirty feet on either side of the house, a golden lawn of flowers greeting them as they pulled up the long drive. So distracted by the marigolds, JJ barely noticed Grandma standing on the roof in only her nightgown.

Her mother frantically jumped out of the car, barely putting it in park. “Mom, oh my god, please get down off the roof!” She bum-rushed into the house before JJ could even unbuckle her seatbelt.

She cracked open the car door and slid out of her seat, her sandals displacing the salt-and-pepper gravel. She shut the door behind her and reached through the driver’s side to take the key out of the ignition. Her mother had managed to make it to the roof somehow, gingerly leading her grandmother by the hand and shoulder out of sight back into the house. JJ glanced at a moving shape out of the corner of her eye: a bright white lizard shimmied across the gravel back into the mess of marigolds. She hoped he liked it better out here than she did. She stared at the spot he’d disappeared for a minute or two before she heard the crunching of gravel approaching.

“JJ, please come inside, Grandma’s not feeling too good,” her mother said through a sigh, walking to the trunk of the car, “could you get her some tea? I’ll bring in our bags, just make sure she’s comfy, please?”

JJ nodded her assent and padded across the gravel through the great wooden doorway. Much too big for a normal person, at least eight or nine feet tall, it made the house seem much more ominous with all the ornate carvings on the frame. It looked like a language but nothing JJ had ever seen, not that she had seen many languages anyway, however. On a nearby wall was a painting of one of the white lizards she had seen outside, a bit abstract but pictured laying on a bed of marigolds. To the left looked like a hallway to the kitchen and ahead was a spacious living room, great bay windows overlooking the empty desert outside.

She took a stroll down the hall to the kitchen, beelining for the first cabinet she could open. On her fifth attempt she found the kettle and by her seventh she’d scrounged up a sad teabag of lapsang souchong. Another cabinet produced Grandma’s nicest cup with the least amount of chips around the edge. It smelt like a campfire once she poured the boiling water on top. She dropped a cube of sugar in for posterity. She headed back to the foyer to scale the spiral staircase.

When she reached the second floor, she took a pause to get her bearings. Her mother and her had always stayed in one of the bedrooms off to the right, meaning one of the rooms to the left should’ve been her grandmother’s. It could also be the door at the end of the hallway, but her mother had never let her inside that one when she was younger. JJ went with her gut and chose the farthest door on the left, gently cracking it open to peer inside.

The room was brighter than the sun with the window uncovered. White walls, white furniture, and a four-post bed in the center with cream-colored bedclothes. Grandma was propped against the pillows, a small figure in such a large bed. JJ was struck by her piercing black eyes staring at her before she could even open the door another inch.

“Hi, Grandma.” JJ said quietly, sliding through the gap in the door. “I’ve got some tea.”

Her grandmother didn’t respond, merely staring. JJ awkwardly stood near the doorway, waiting for some kind of response, before her grandmother’s hand lifted from the bedspread to beckon her closer. She was practically skin and bone, her veins like river maps all along her arm and gesturing hand. JJ trotted over obediently with the cup, setting it gently on the nightstand. A pharmacist’s entire inventory sat on the nightstand, every other kind of medication necessary to keep her grandmother functioning.

She made no move to grab the tea cup. “I added some sugar.”

“…Thank you.” JJ thought she might as well have whispered for all the volume she spoke with.

“Are you feeling any better?”

Her grandmother gave her a scathing look, like she’d just spat on her Thanksgiving turkey. “I’m not sick. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

JJ did not feel like debating. “Okay,” she said, sitting on the edge of the bed, “why were you up on the roof just now?”

The ten years since she’d last seen her had been markedly unkind. Her face was like a wax reconstruction of a porcelain doll left to marinate in the desert. JJ could see the white of her eye through her eyelids rolling as she scoffed at her. “I was waiting for the storm. Not like your mother would ever tell you the family history, but I can feel it getting closer.”

This woman was distinctly unmedicated at the moment. “It doesn’t storm out here often, does it?”

“Of course not, that’s what the marigolds are for.”

“…I’m not following. Do you want me to grab my mom, or-“

“The marigolds, they keep away the storms. But they’re failing me now, I can feel it.”

JJ was growing impatient. “Okay, so I’m going to go grab my mom, wait right here.”

She made to stand before her grandmother grabbed her by the forearm, her nails sinking into the skin. Her grip was ridiculously strong, withstanding the violent shake JJ wriggled her with.

“Get off of me right now, Grandma, I don’t want to-“

“Just listen to me, Julia, listen to me now!” She hissed through her teeth, tightening her grip.

JJ froze in place and relaxed, her grandmother’s grip loosening by a hair.

“The lightning, it took your uncle. It took your grandfather too. It’s taken half your cousins and it’s on its way to take you too if you don’t listen to me now.”

“What does that even mean?”

“Everything about this place is designed to keep the storm at bay. A clay house in the desert, marigolds in the yard, the Nahuatl on the doorframe, it’s all a ploy!” Her grip finally slid loose off her wrist. The half-moon imprints on her skin were bright red.

“Okay… what does the storm want?”

“It knows what we did. What they did. And it wants to be paid in years.” Her grandmother was practically deflating before her eyes, sinking down into the cushions like a ghost.

“…What did you do?”

She had begun crying. “I won’t give it years, not like my babies. Not like Charles. I won this time.” Her fragile hands struggled to wipe the tears as she visibly grew more tired.

JJ was starting to panic. “Hey, I’m gonna get my mom. Just hold on, please.”

She darted out of the room and nearly ran into her mother on the stairs, her cell phone up to her ear. “What’s the matter, what’s happening?”

“Something’s really wrong.”

Her mother shoved past her and JJ followed right behind. She promptly walked right into her back when her mother stopped dead in her tracks. She glanced over her mother’s shoulder.

Her grandmother’s door was cracked open and the door at the end of the hall was now wide open.

“Son of a bitch,” her mother muttered under her breath.

She stomped off down the hall and disappeared into the darkness of the room, shutting the door behind her. The distant sound of feet tapping on metal growing fainter and fainter. JJ moved to follow but became distracted by the darkening of her grandmother’s room through the crack. She glanced around the door and saw the swirling of a storm stretching as far as the eye could see. Thunder cracked like car crashes and lightning flashed in a hundred directions.

JJ was getting concerned now. She knew her Uncle Donovan had died in a storm some years earlier in eerily similar circumstances to her Grandpa Charlie. Two of her cousins had died out on the lake, but everyone had chalked it up to unaccounted poor weather and coincidence. If whatever her grandmother was blathering was true, then all of it could be connected. But this poor old woman, God only knows how old, could’ve lost her mind by now.

JJ slowly crept to the room at the end of the hall, pushing open the door in the dark. It looked like a childhood bedroom for someone, a young boy perhaps, with cowboy memorabilia clustered on a set of shelves on the frog-green walls. A twin bed lay undisturbed by time, neatly folded astronaut-themed bedspread tucked all the way to the headboard. In the center of the room was a haphazard metal ladder bolted into the floor. It led to a poorly cut hole in the ceiling, the thunderous sky peeking through overhead. Fat raindrops cascaded onto the floor and over the thunder, JJ could barely hear a screaming argument.

She shimmied up the ladder and peered out onto the roof. Her mother was laying on her stomach only a few feet away from the hole, her arms covering the top of her head.

“Please, please Mom, get down off the roof! It’s not going to hurt you, please we have to get inside NOW!” Her mother screamed, voice barely discernible over the thunder.

The sky was getting darker by the second and lightning seemed to course across the sky like veins seeking the heart. Her grandmother stood drenched with her arms outstretched to the sky. She was the heart.

“Melinda, go inside, it’s not time for you yet,” she shouted, “and it won’t be for many moons, I promise you that.”

JJ’s mother screamed through sobs and assurances as her grandmother swayed in the monsoon winds. White streaks of electricity converged over the house in milliseconds, charging into a blinding white spot overhead. JJ struck her arm out as far as she could and hooked one of her mother’s belt loops and yanked with all her might. She had barely squeezed her mother down the hole and onto a ladder rung before the lightning struck.

A brightness like Heaven, or maybe an atom bomb, flashed quick as sin and the house shook like an earthquake. The sound of a redwood hitting the ground echoed and the scent of ozone permeated the air. As soon as it came it was already gone, the rain halting, the storm rolling away.

Both JJ and her mother uncovered their eyes and looked out at the silence. Where her grandmother had stood was a blackened jagged bullseye. The shapes of her slippers were all that was left.

“...Mom, how old was Grandma?”

“Sixty-five.”

“Why did she look like that?”

“The lightning takes years, Julia. It takes them however it can.”