by Jerri Jerreat

1.  A recipe for lightning:

High heat
1 tire, rolling away
2 ambulance sirens yelling
3 black clouds
People howling 
A nose, or a leg, blood 
And a really bad feeling deep inside.

2.  “And what did you feel then, Anna?” 
Why should I tell you anything?
“Perhaps we could review what led up to your…the incident.”
You have weird paintings, for a doctor. Is that an elephant or a butterfly?
“What were you thinking about when you woke up that morning? Did you have one of your bad dreams?”
And that one is just a big, grey puddle. 
“I’ve heard that you have some really bad dreams sometimes. That’s quite normal, you know, Anna. Everyone has bad dreams.”
Maybe it’s the ocean? Oceans are bad. They swallow islands. I don’t want to go there.
“Let’s talk about your dreams.” The man sighed. “Your dreams?”
It’s a bad painting, if you ask me. Could give you bad dreams.
“Can you tell me about your dreams?”
I don’t remember my dreams and that picture over there of a fake window? We can tell it’s fake. 
“Your mother said you once drew a box inside a box, and inside was a peach.” He paused for several seconds. “Do you have any—um—close--friends who are girls?”
I didn’t mean for the cardboard to catch but… I just really need to work outside. With space. Outside I’ll be able to see--
“What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when I say a word? You just have to say the first thing that pops into your head. Okay, Anna? It might even be silly. But just try. Hmm. Let me see. Anna, what’s the first thing you think of when I say the word…
fire?”

3.  Lightning.

4. The Odds

The odds of being hit by lightning in one year are slim, 1 in 700,000. The odds of being struck by lightning over your entire life are higher. About 1 in 3,000. With the planet’s temperature increasing, extreme hurricanes are multiplying, as are lightning strikes, every year. What to do about them?

 5. Therapy and Lightning.

Sigmund Freud theorized that dreams used symbols to express desires and anxieties. A loud train racing toward a tunnel, or riding a horse—these meant rising sexual desire. Forbidden. (The Victorian era.) A dream of fire? Raging passions. Lust, or perhaps anger. 
But lightning? Worse than fire. (He surely thought a frontal lobotomy was in order.)

6.  Rewards and punishments sometimes work. The reward has to be something desired. The punishment is often a privilege, removed.
Sometimes it is better to get the child to draw or paint if they won’t talk. Failing that, you could put them in drama classes to help express their emotions. Or dancing. The idea is to express these violent, unnatural, unacceptable emotions, in a safe manner. 

7. Anna, at eight, drew diagrams that her conservative white cis parents couldn’t decipher. Full of symbols. She felt clumsy and robotic in dance class and so sat in a corner, busy thinking. 
“What is wrong with that girl?” asked a petite blonde to her mother, pointing at Anna.
Anna’s mother, in the waiting room, cupped her stylist-sprayed hair lightly and pretended to read a fashion magazine. Inside she was screeching: What’s wrong with my daughter? Why can’t she be normal?
“Sit up straight, Anna. Don’t slouch!” her mother snapped on the drive home. She looked in the rearview mirror and thought, for the thousandth time, is she even mine?Anna, long brown straight hair pulled into tight braids, hazel eyes facing the window, was working out formulae. As usual, she didn’t notice her mother.

8. Hot sea breezes, we know, create thunderstorms. In the U.S.A., Florida has the most lightning strikes. Increasing, of course. In Canada, the CN Tower in Toronto is struck approximately 80 times annually by lightning. 

9. Anna, at 12, was not dreaming of Prince Charming or making an Olympic team. 
She was not picturing her next birthday party, full of friends.
She had no friends. She knew the adult non-fiction librarian, Octavia, better than her parents. Octavia was working on a degree in chemistry, and recommended books.
Her mother complained constantly that Anna needed to stop reading, but had, over time, grown accustomed to setting Anna’s plate at the table, handing her a lunch pail or new clothing. Anna had cut her hair at age ten, hacked it off gasped her mother, but, after a stylist had fashioned a short-layered look, that had solved that. There had been no further attempts at dance lessons, piano, dresses, pretty shoes. If new sweatpants or runners or plain t-shirts appeared on her bed, Anna wore them. Otherwise, she ignored the clothes. She didn’t care that much; just wanted to be able to move. Her parents watched t.v., argued about rising prices, or neighbours, or work, forgetting, often, that they even had a child in the house. She was just that quiet. 
Anna, upstairs in her room, at 12, was picturing tiny radio capacitors, little canisters like witch fingers holding electricity before letting it out. How to make them bigger? A lot bigger? House sized? Apartment building sized? 
Hidden under her mattress was a grade ten physics text. 

10.   What to do if you see lightning or hear thunder:

a) Go indoors. A building with plumbing and wiring is best. Stay away from windows, running water, and don’t make toast if you’re on the landline to your mother.
b) Second best: get inside a car. Don’t touch the metal doors. If the car is hit, you’re in a pickle. You mustn’t touch the metal exterior as you exit, so execute a tricky jump and roll. Perhaps practice this ahead of time, into pillows.

11. Anna is swimming through sky tears. It’s up there, she knows. It’s coming. And then she’ll be alone.
(“Do you know how many people have been KILLED by lightning, young lady? It’s not something to mess with! Why can’t you just play video games like a normal kid?”)

12. Anna liked working at Mo’s Electric Repair Café from age fourteen, coming home with her arms full of precious Frankenstein parts. She loved routing a current to make sound or light, playing around with electricity. What, in nature, is really static anyway? Everything is moving. Even the atoms inside rocks are dancing, slowly. Mo had been amused when the young teen had offered to volunteer. He was sixty, lazy, and happy to have a free employee but didn’t want to babysit. No problemo there. 
Within a week, Anna had the hang of troubleshooting cranky toasters, DVD machines, blenders. The next year, she was fixing sewing machines, real finicky work, and he started to pay her. 
By that time there were fourteen notebooks, crammed full of notes and drawings under Anna’s bed, and a university physics books under her pillow.

13.  The safest place in the world, for lightning storms, is Antarctica.

14. The new office girl at Mo’s, Valencia, age 19, in sweaters, jeans, dangly earrings, was clever, but serious. All she had to do was raise one eyebrow at a man’s flirtation and it stopped. Anna, seventeen, sweatpants and baggy tops, was impressed. How did she do it? And study those thick anatomy books while taking calls, doing orders and bills? And the way she moved—the words “languid” and “liquid” came to mind. A dancer. Valencia could stretch one leg up above her head casually while on a phone call. It was quite-- disconcerting. Not just for the mechanics. 
Valencia was the most alive person Anna had ever met.

15. Thunder is the sound of air popping from the extreme voltage of electrons leaping from cloud to cloud. Or between cloud and ground. It is electric popcorn. No need to be afraid. Right?

16. The two began talking. Valencia, hair in puffs, braids, twists, updos and complex designs that Anna marveled at, was tiny, delicate looking, with a hearty laugh and opinions. Red should never be worn with blue. The Conservative Party and Corporate Business were Satan, and people who took advantage of younger dancers or actors should be castrated. She signed two or three petitions a week. She was nothing like Anna, ($8 boys’ haircut), whose brain was a fog of wires and knew nothing of politics, or the world, really. They listened to each other, made each other laugh. 
Anna felt that another part of her brain was waking up after a long coma.
Valencia had golden brown eyes that closed slowly sometimes as she concentrated.

17. A sprite, in atmospheric physics, is produced by intense lightning between clouds and the ground. This creates an unusual electrostatic field above the clouds, resulting in a colorful dance. Sorcery?

18. Anna began university early, took GO bus to subway to streetcar to class, while Valencia was studying dancing and now massage therapy. Valencia led a double life, working and studying by day, dancing at night. She introduced Anna to the breath, to the beauty of movement, to the human body—muscles and bones, sinews, tendons, ligaments. It was almost like wires. One day at work, Valencia lifted Anna’s white freckled arm, held it, then began to massage it downward in a circular motion. Anna’s eyes widened; her pencil fell. Sensations, so many sensations. Her skin was electric. She was surprised shocks did not radiate out from her fingertips.
They rented an apartment together, a basement in The Danforth. Anna had never tasted tzatziki before, became addicted to roasted eggplant. Sometimes the kind Muslim student upstairs invited them into the backyard for lemonade. Public transit was excellent, fast,  becoming electric. Toronto was so much more--alive—than smaller towns. 
Valencia dragged Anna on weekends to thrift shops for: an old school desk, a lamp shaped like a witch, a wooden toy box. They painted some amber, or rubbed wax into old wood. Anna had never known. 
Any of this.
Valencia had golden brown eyes that closed slowly sometimes as Anna leaned in.

19. If you fall in love with a person with vastly different interests than you, the relationship has a one in sixty chance of surviving.

20. The abandoned drive-in movie property, a town away, was made for undisclosed storm experiments. There were tall leaning metal posts with defunct lights, weeds, dirt and a broken chain link fence around. No one came there. Valencia sometimes helped transport the simple cabinets, was able to borrow old vans, and even did some of the digging. Dancers are pure muscle, but styling gorgeous black hair takes time. She wore a flowered headwrap for the dust. Afterward were long baths with Epsom salts. She nagged Anna to shower nightly, groom, eat. 
Anna, (who, it turned out, liked that nagging), often scrounged at the dump for scrap plywood, two by fours, or metal, glorious metal, often skipping classes. She always brought a fresh barista coffee for old George, the dump manager, sometimes a doughnut.
“I heard there’s a new coffee,” George would hint, never satisfied. “Ya heard of a Monkey’s Uncle cappuccino?” 

21. Anna is tossing her head now, dreaming, wishing she’d kept visiting George. He’d had no teeth. “Too much coffee,” he’d tease. She wished she’d bought him dentures.

22. With one cat in the yard (a cat would be nice)
that used to be so hard.
Now everything feels easy (why don’t we have a cat?)
Anna and Valencia adopted a stray calico, full of fleas.

23. Overseas, they’d been using powerful, short, pulsing lasers to convince a storm to drop its lightning somewhere safe. Very sensible plan. The next step was to induce lightning to hit an area full of tall conductors. These could carry that energy down to large capacitors buried in the ground. . . 
Anna played with these ideas throughout an Engineering degree, studying and acing exams along the way. She was obsessed with her experiments at the old drive-in, where she’d furtively buried several test capacitors and cemented in an old t.v./radio ladder antenna George had saved for her. She had to join an e-car-share program because she went there so often, usually carrying supplies. Occasionally, Valencia griped. “You’re barely here,” she complained.

24. Anna drank coffee through most of one night, trying to impress the Suit who had come to a carefully anonymous club in a gas-guzzling limousine. To meet her. Anna.
Anna had spent the prior week in growing terror. Valencia had held her, calmed her. She had rubbed Anna’s chest and back with oils that smelled like pumpkin pie and the Thanksgiving Anna had blown out the dining room lights, experimenting in the basement with currents.

25.       Anna is drifting on a current of rain, worrying in her sleep. Don’t leave me.

26. The world is mixed up. Millionaires (years of underpaying their workers, ignoring safety protocols and basic human rights), suddenly see God in a high-speed boating accident and decide to back Green Energy. Subsequently, an unknown, possibly crazy young inventor who didn’t even attend her Engineering graduation, mocked by fellow students, receives funding.

27. Anna had difficulty sleeping, though she was pretty certain she was doing the right thing. Despite what everyone was saying, she thought she was on the right track. (She repeated this to herself every night, like a mantra. Especially when alone).

28. Valencia’s eyes were laughing, her large teeth (she showed many teeth when she laughed) glinted as she spun in a room full of roses. Anna’s roses. After the show. Valencia was in a modern dance troupe, not the lead, but her movements were magical. To Anna.

29. Young scientist thinks she’s Madam Curie, the headline states. 
Anna moans in her sleep.

30. Valencia squeezes her hand, then Anna climbs the carpeted steps.
Ontario Hydro is proud to announce that the first FlashForce Electrical Plant has, over the past year, slowly taken over the duties of three electrical generating stations, formerly using fossil fuel.
Calgary is the world’s first lightning-powered city!
Blitz! From Stuttgart, Germany!
Foudre! From Paris.
Sajetti! Malta.

31. “It’s not safe out tonight, Valencia. Stay here with me.”
“You sound like your mother.” Valencia tossed Anna an oatmeal cookie. “You’re just whining because you hate the ocean. C’mon. Halifax? I’d love to dance there!”
“Okay, it was beautiful. The whole region is, though the shoreline is being swallowed. Melting glaciers.” Anna shivered. “It’s travelling I hate. Alone. I wish you’d been able…”
Valencia raised an eyebrow. Thunder shook the townhouse, a neighbourhood in Halton Hills with heat pumps, solar rooves, and a Miyawaki forest out back. Val could hop an e-bus to Toronto for dance rehearsals. On the counter in the next room, the cork in the fine Niagara wine spontaneously popped. Henry of Pelham, Baco Noir, Family Reserve.
They looked at each other.
“Barometer’s dropping. Air pressure,” explained Anna. She forced herself out of the butter yellow sofa and followed Valencia, zombie like. She had remembered to shower, scrub, and put on fresh jeans and a plain linen shirt, Val’s shopping. “I miss you.”
“Stop being so darn famous.” Valencia’s voice was light. “Stay home once in a while.”
(Was it a light tone? Was it?) 
Anna lifted her hand and stroked Valencia’s arm, then gently wrapped her thumb and forefinger around the wrist. “You’re so delicate, Val,” she whispered. “Yet so strong.”
They both smiled.
Valencia smoothed Anna’s pale cheek with the back of her fingers, a habit. “You’ll be fine, alone.”
“I know, but—“
“Order curry. I’ll be back in an hour and a half. This is a forty-five-minute massage. Cheapskate.” She grinned. 
“We don’t need—“ but Anna stopped herself. Valencia was proud.
“I need.” Valencia shrugged. “But I’ll let you take me to the Blue Mountains after our next show. How’s that? I hear it’s gorgeous. We can hike, swim. Maybe see a play.”

32. Anna was left looking across an expanse of bamboo floor and two tall ferns to the door. Closing. “I’ll get you extra pappadums!” she called as the door shut. Out the window she saw their small electric car glide away. Anna’s throat closed. Jazz, their cat, meowed.
The rain was loud, thunderous, the rain was the sky, an electrical generating force, the world a capacitor, the cities and skies cleaner, nuclear plants closed and their ponds cemented shut. Temporary safety. 

33. Capacitors. Rain. Coffin.
Anna is having another bad dream, like those childhood ones after her favourite young aunt had perished in a storm’s car crash. Those had left Anna standing, wailing, dripping with tears, in incoherent anguish. She dreamt of rain, storms, lightning, tires, death. Of being alone. Dreams that always vanished by morning. She has been fighting those dream, it seems, all her life. Or using them.

Valencia! Do you want dahl?
The townhouse door is closing. 

34. Thanks to the ingenuity of this brilliant inventor, something positive is being harnessed out of Global Warming. Storms can kill, it’s true, but they can also heal. The electricity now generated from a single blast of lightning can power a laser to remove a tumour. It can power streetlights for safe travel, charge a fleet of electric buses, and run the lights in greenhouses to grow our food. 

35. The rain is falling.
Anna awakes. She feels so alone, waiting. She has been dozing on the sofa, dreaming, clutching a soft merino wool blanket. Fair trade, Val insists. The cat is on her feet, one paw holding on to her leg, snoring. Anna’s arm is cold, there is no tingling in her fingers. 

Her cell phone has a message. “How about dahl? I’ll get dessert,” it reads.