Monday Flash: A Reading of Chad Prevost's "Seven Lightning Strikes"
Chad Prevost
Seven Lightning StrikesStrike #1
No one to see how his eyes had been on the waving pine boughs as the ump raised his hands and the players hustled in. No one to him just a few beats behind, as he crossed the infield just past second base. No one to see his every hair stand on end. A flash as quick as an eyeblink, thunder booming in the chest. No light shown in his eyes. Only his boots blown halfway to first as if he'd leapt ahead of himself.Strike #2
He doesn't telling anyone his heart flutters, his ears ring. The strike means he was born to preach. People flock to him. The Itinerant Miracle. Witness the Man Who Lived Thru Lightning. Lazarus in the Flesh. He's baptizing a young believer in the river outside Palm Beach. "Luck," he bellows to the multitudes, "is just another word for fate." Amen. "We all have mountains to climb." Preach on. "I baptize you in the name—" A dazzle of light. The girl shudders in his arms, passes on to the Second Birth. He can't feel his body as he carries the girl's to shore.Strike #3
Hammering, this time, out of the open blue. Right in the middle of the duck boat like a bolt from Zeus. When he wakes he feels his hairless arms, smooth brow—the knot of burned flesh on his scapula. He remembers it like a dream. Fish swimming just beneath the surface, the water lucid. He closes his eyes and sees the stripes on the bass, can almost count the spots on the freckled bream. In the mirror, he sees the eyelashes are gone too. How like the hairless creatures of creation we are, he thinks.Strike #4
How much more miraculous is he now? A man struck down by 300 kilovolts three times, a man still on the right path? This time during the Invitation at a revival in downtown Rhode Island. No rain. Just people waving their hands, some swooning, some speaking in tongues. Only wind gusting off the river and across Memorial Hill. No thunder warning. Quick, sudden, like death to Ananias. Blasts him backwards out of his Samsonite metal folding chair, right out of his toenails. When he rises again from the hospital table after minor surgery, the dumbstruck town rejoices.Strike #5
Hell's Canyon, Idaho. Through his pick-up's window—a direct blow to the temple, his hair blazes hot and fast like dry pine. He says, I saw the beast who comes from the Euphrates and the many heads of the European Union and strange flowers blooming on Megidda. I saw the 1906 Earthquake in San Francisco. An angel bent me over and struck me with his rod. With each blow he yelled out a name, each one standing for the twelve tribes of Israel. I threw up and the vile became a gold butterfly. The angel said it stands for all who cannot contain the words of terror which reign in the hearts and minds of men. He said if the rulers of this age understood God's wisdom they would not crucify the Lord of Glory again.Strike #6
Golfing on July 4th at 4:00 in the afternoon in Panama, Florida. The most likely time and place to be struck on the planet. He has nothing to lose. No one can believe how he goes on living. His fiancé fans herself in the golf cart. The nine iron flies from his white glove which flies from his outstretched hands which flies from his thumbnails. His fiancé leaves him, says she needs space. "Thank you," he says to the nurse, coming in with food from the hospital cafeteria. "You're a lucky man," she says.Strike #7
"Not all who wander are lost," he says. He drops a clay pot on the stage. It shatters. Lightning blows through the stained-glass window. His body seizes. His white robes flutter. Someone says, "O my God." Someone says to call 911. His robe is singed black. They're carrying him away on a stretcher when he opens his eyes and says, "Who will pick up the vessel's pieces?" I make a profession of faith on the spot. He shoots himself three times in the heart the next day. They say from losing in love. They say a lot of funny things.
This story appears with the permission of the author and originally appeared in online in Tattoo Highway, and in print in The Seattle Review.
First, some thoughts on lightning strikes, from the source for everything, Wikipedia:
Roy Cleveland Sullivan (February 7, 1912 – September 28, 1983) was a U.S. park ranger in Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. Between 1942 and 1977, Sullivan was hit by lightning on seven different occasions and survived all of them. For this reason, he gained a nickname 'Human Lightning Conductor"' or 'Human Lightning Rod.' Sullivan is recognized by Guinness World Records as the person being struck by lightning more recorded times than any other human being. He died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at the age of 71.
The odds of being struck by lightning for an ordinary person over the period of 80 years have been roughly estimated as 1:3000. If the lightning strikes were independent events, the probability of being hit seven times would be 1:30007, or 1:22x1024.
I think a lot of things reading this piece. I think of The Godfather, when Michael Corelone in Sicily sees Apollonia (as opposed to Dionysus) and his companion says, "è stato un colpo di fulmine," it has been a stroke of lightning, the Italian saying used when somebody falls in love at the first sight. I think of reading Robert Frost and that "intent" in Nature, as in "Once By the Pacific":
The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God's last Put out the Light was spoken.
Of course there's Mount Olympus, too, and the anger of Zeus. And also something of flash ("as quick as an eyeblink") itself, "like the lightning, which doth cease to be / Ere one can say / It lightens." Prevost's main character has become a lightning rod, of which its American inventor Benjamin Franklin said could cause "the electrical fire...[to] be drawn out of a cloud silently, before it could come near enough to strike." Lightning often found churches: "The church tower of many European cities, usually the highest structure, was the building often hit by lightning. Early on, Christian churches tried to prevent the occurrence of the damaging effects of lightning by prayers: 'Temper the destruction of hail and cyclones and the force of tempests and lightning; check hostile thunders and great winds; and cast down the spirits of storms and the powers of the air.'"
"Luck," he bellows to the multitudes, "is just another word for fate." One wonders what it means to be so chosen by the heavens, to be the one that its lightning is intended for. These strikes, of course, must mean something; perhaps, what he was born for. And later, that nurse, "You're a lucky man." There's something of luck in the number 7, something else, too, something of the ages of humankind, of sins, something of being struck, not once, but again and again and again and again and again.
"No light shown in his eyes." Everywhere else he goes, "a dazzle of light." There's people of books: Zeus, Ananias, Samson(ite); places such as Hell's Canyon, Memorial Hill, Meggida, and its hint of Armageddon. There's crossing the infield, baptizing a young believer, hammering out of the open blue, just people waving their hands, a direct blow to the temple, golfing on July 4th, and the seventh: lightning blows through the stained-glass windows.
It reads as a sermon of sorts, of those Biblical and mythic stories of someone pursued by the heavens for reasons mortals cannot comprehend. Was it something he did? Something he didn't do? Something he possesses? Something he lacks? There is something miraculous in knowing what the gods and goddesses see us as, what role they have chosen for us, the name we will be known as forever after. Seven Lightning Strikes. They have given him his fate, and one wonders if those gunshots have something to do with destiny, the life we choose for ourselves.
They say a lot of funny things.
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