My mother has a nickname for trees that have been carved out by fire or decay toward the bottom of their trunks, creating a concave place where a person has room to stand or crouch. The animal looks as if it shouldn’t have survived the attack. There’s a pale, caramel-tinged cow-still alive, still standing in a field-its entire left side charred, its raw, plum-colored wounds outlined in an awful, singed black. One man’s red-welted back looks as if he’d been slashed by a knife. Or maybe it looks like a mossy extension of his long sideburn. Another man’s scar resembles the ginger-colored rust on an iron gate in my favorite nineteenth-century cemetery in Richmond, Virginia. She’s marked with bright, violet Spanish moss that spills from her jaw down her neck to rest just above her breasts. Another photograph shows a woman in a plain, matronly, ivory bra with the picture cut off at her chin. Over his tawny skin scrawl the intricate pink fronds of a fiddlehead fern as they split into smaller and smaller threadlike tendrils. His struck arm hangs simply, by his side. The patterned cotton competes with the tangled shapes of his injury. One photograph shows the torso of a shirtless young man seated on a paisley bedspread. What if, like Gretel Ehrlich, during her second-and more sinister-strike, you had to drag your own heavy legs across a grassy plain? What if, like her, it took you five years to recover?īut as I scan the photographs of strangers’ marred skin, I can’t help thinking that many of the scars are beautiful, like ancient, Old World cartographies. What if someone had their memories erased by lightning? You can break bones if you lose consciousness and fall. I know a bolt can cause heart damage, knock your head against a boulder, throw you into waves of amnesia. I know being struck by lightning isn’t all shivery leg-sequins and synesthesia. Many people have uploaded pictures of their lightning scars to the internet to share the arresting visual aftermath of their encounters. I’d bear those rare beauty marks hard-won by the wildest charge and chance. I’d possess a singular tale of danger and survival. I imagined that, through having them, I’d never have to worry about my shyness, about the low-pitched tone of my voice, about never having a story impressive enough to tell strangers I’d meet at parties or on airplanes. I imagined mine would resemble those exact marks. Norman had strawberry blonde hair-like mine-and fair, freckled skin, so her lightning scars showed up starkly as matching rose-pink stars. She was scorched with two inch-long scars: one where the bolt entered, on her right thumb-tip, and one on that same arm’s elbow, where the electricity exited her body. The force of the hit had spun her in a complete circle, a full 360 degrees. She said she’d been struck the moment she placed her car key into her vehicle’s lock in the parking lot of her grocery store. I remember the day my eleventh grade English teacher Mrs. I don’t think it’s too much to ask of an empty field, a parking lot, a car’s beckoning antenna. My lips vibrating as if they could translate the troposphere. I’d settle for pomegranate seeds spinning down the white of my red hair’s part. I want the feeling the writer Gretel Ehrlich-twice-struck in her life-describes during her first experience with lightning as it moved through her body as she walked the Wyoming plains: it felt, she claims, “as though sequins had been poured down my legs.” But I want more than the science, the pie charts, the hard facts. A stroke that can run 100,000 miles in just one second, that stretches and sparks over three miles long. I’m talking about a bolt five times as hot as the surface of the sun. I don’t mean struck by a blinding desire or love at first sight. When I admit my secret wish is to get struck by lightning, I’m not speaking figuratively.
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