Fractured Light

The pool's turquoise surface shimmered like a suspended breath as I swallowed my vitamin D supplement, each pill a tiny promise to my skeleton that winter might not break it this time. Sarah's brother Mark had convinced everyone at the party that our bodies were starving for what we couldn't give them—iron, magnesium, hope.

"I used to play baseball," Mark said, suddenly, sloshing beer onto the concrete. "Third base. Coach said I had decent form."

Sarah's eyes found mine across the pool. We both knew Mark had never played organized sports in his life. The stroke had rewritten his hippocampus three years ago, replacing his memoirs with someone else's fiction.

"Your form was terrible," I said, and Sarah's mouth twitched.

The cat—a ragged calico that had adopted them post-stroke, when Mark couldn't remember he hated animals—curled near my chair. Its tail flicked at mosquitoes. I wondered what it remembered from before. Probably not much. Animals lived in the permanent present, no past to haunt them, no future to dread.

Then lightning fractured the sky behind the oak tree, violet and catastrophic. For a split second, the party's laughter seemed suspended, everyone frozen mid-gesture, mid-lie, mid-life. The pool's surface turned to glass, reflecting a world that had just ended.

When thunder finally came, Sarah didn't jump. Neither did I. We just watched each other across the water, two people who'd stayed too long at the scene of the accident, pretending we might still rebuild from the wreckage.

"That's it," Mark said, staring up. "Show's over."

Nobody moved. The cat licked its paw. I swallowed the bitter aftertaste of pretending some things could be fixed with the right supplements, the right patience, the right kind of love. Some fractures run too deep for healing. Some lightning strikes you don't see coming, and some you watch approach for years, helpless to run.