100 Million Volts
March 18 2026
Like a bullet
you feel before you hear
recoil before you feel,
lightning passes through you
before the thunderclap
or even the white flash
have a chance to register.
You look down,
perplexed to see
blood blossoming from your chest,
or find yourself knocked flat
with a ringing in your ears,
nerves electric
and a jackhammer pounding your head.
You may have caught the gunmetal glint
or barrel flash
out the corner of your eye.
May have seen anvil clouds
boiling blackly up,
felt approaching thunder
compress the air
and reverberate through the ground.
A warning you might have heeded
if there’d been somewhere to hide
and time to flee.
Life blindsides you like that,
a bystander
hit in a drive-by
some random night,
or out of a clear blue sky
as if fate
had it in for you.
And when you regain consciousness
and check your watch
it will have stopped at the precise time
your life was divided
between before and after
then and now.
The odds it will strike again
are infinitesimally small.
But not as dimensionless
as that instant in time
when your old self was lost
and someone else
stepped in to take your place.
The closest I came must have been just feet away. I recall the intense white light, the all-consuming sound. Fortunately, I was in the car and was completely unharmed. (But when I got home — at the other end of our long driveway — I found major electrical damage at the house.)
Lightning tends to recur in places where weather patterns and geography combine to make lightning storms more probable. So for people who habituate these places, getting struck twice is not as unlikely as statistics predict.
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