tempestas

It was a murky Thursday evening and Morris Mendelsen was hoping to be struck by lightning.

The storm had rolled in yesterday, a wash of eggshell thunder-cracks and pissing rain, tearing the sheets off his clothesline with a kind of divine apathy. He had waded into the gardenia bushes to untangle now sopping pillowcases, startling a gang of magpies that had been sitting on the fence in the downpour. They took to the air, cawing indignantly in his general direction. His jacket was tissue-paper soaked almost immediately, the wet worming its way into his socks and up his sleeves as he scrabbled in the branches. He was just scooping up the last towel when a wink of brilliant light had made him look up.

Reluctant thunder crunched like gravel underfoot. Morris gazed tightly at the sky through spatters and beads of water. There was a pause. Then the lightning came again, a graceful arcing seam in the distant air. It left Morris blinking the pink afterimage from his eyelids.

He stood for a long time, letting the wind lash lazily around him. His heart raced, the hair on his arms standing army-straight as he gripped the pillowcase with pearly knuckles. He felt none of it. Not the chill of his clinging clothes, not the rivulets of sky that pooled at the corners of his worn face, not the branches that grabbed urgently at his legs in the gale.

No, he was back with Mother, on the porch of his childhood home, a different storm drumming secret rhythms on the corrugated roof. Him, full of zeal in his oversized gumboots. And her. Yes, there she was, sitting in her favourite chair, wrapped in her favourite scarf. Looking at him with those kind eyes, a sort of wry smile tweaking at the edges of her mouth.

Finish your tea Morris. Then you can go play in the rain.

He had grumbled but complied, wolfing down his cheese and apple slices before tugging on his raincoat in an eager rush. Moving through the curtain of water pouring off the lip of the roof, he had turned to look at her.

Yes, he remembered it now. At that moment the sun had suddenly broken out, casting the downpour in pearlescent clarity. Through those glassy threads of water she had looked otherworldly, the light warming her face where it gratefully settled.

She had smiled at him then, an expression full of easy joy. His first, last, most chest-twisting memory of her.

Then, a lightning strike so close and loud that the world went white. When his vision had cleared, she had been gone. Not dead, not ‘missing’. Gone, like an unwritten storybook, like the flame of an unlit candle. It was as though she had simply never been. But Morris remembered now, and he held the memory so fiercely that he thought his chest might crack open with the force of the remembering.

The rain picked up, fat marbles hammering urgently against his face. Trees contorted in the howl of a fresh gale. He looked up again, into the dim knot of clouds that now wept so freely.

I remember you.

Perhaps he thought it; perhaps he said it aloud. Regardless it felt for a moment as though the storm quieted, relieved. He thought that perhaps a sheet of sunlight might pierce through the cloud-bank of evening, that the sky might brighten. Perhaps.

Then, a flash of light, an embrace.

And Morris Mendelsen was gone. Not dead, not 'missing'. Gone like an unwritten storybook, like the flame of an unlit candle. It was as though he had simply never been.