Orange Lightning at Midnight

Mara sat on her fire escape with a container of cold spinach and feta, watching the storm roll in across the Brooklyn skyline. The coaxial cable from her neighbor's TV sagged between buildings like a clothesline nobody had bothered to remove, swaying in the gathering wind.

Forty-two and still optimizing systems for a startup that would probably pivot into oblivion by Christmas. She'd told herself this was the year she'd figure it out—the Sphinx's riddle of her own existence. Instead, she'd just gotten better at pretending.

Her phone buzzed. David, again.

"I don't know if I can do this," he'd said three nights ago, standing in her kitchen as she chopped vegetables. "I need something different."

Something different. Not someone else. There was a distinction, she supposed, though it felt like splitting hairs while the house burned down.

Lightning fissured the sky—a violent orange crack that illuminated the grid of streets below. For a second, everything was bright as day. Then darkness, deeper than before.

Her mother used to say that moments like these were God's way of making you pay attention. But her mother was three years dead, and Mara wasn't sure she believed in much anymore except deadlines and the occasional night when she could remember to buy spinach instead of ordering takeout.

She opened the container. The spinach was wilted now, olive oil pooling at the edges. Still she ate it, methodical, as if proper nutrition could somehow compensate for whatever was hollowing her out from inside.

The coaxial cable whipped violently in the wind. She thought about David in his apartment across the river, probably not sleeping either. Probably making lists. David loved lists.

Another flash of lightning—orange again, sickly and beautiful—and in that instant she understood: nobody was coming. The Sphinx had no answer. The riddle was just living with not knowing.

She finished the spinach. She went inside. She sent David a message: "Okay."

Sometimes acceptance was the only lightning strike that mattered.