Static Signal
Maya's iPhone 15 lay on the porch railing, its screen flickering with 47 unread notifications. Her cousin Marisol watched her own phone, scrolling through stories with the practiced detachment of someone who'd seen it all before.
"You're missing it," Marisol said, nodding toward the pasture where Grandpa's prize bull, Buster, stood silhouetted against the darkening sky. "He only does this during storms."
Maya scoffed. "Does what? Stand there?" But her thumb hesitated over her screen. The FOMO was real — her friends were at a party without her, the kind where they'd definitely post everything she was missing.
Then the first **lightning** streaked across the sky, brilliant purple-white lines crackling through clouds that looked like someone had taken a highlighter to them. Maya's phone dinged with a new notification, but she didn't look.
Buster the bull began to run. Not away from the storm but toward it, his massive frame moving with unexpected grace, like he was chasing something only he could see. Maya felt it then — that weird electric feeling in the air, the kind that makes your arm hair stand up and everything suddenly feel too quiet and too loud at the same time.
"He's trying to catch the storm," Marisol said quietly. "Grandpa says animals can feel it coming. They don't overthink it like we do."
Maya looked at her iPhone, still glowing with the promise of somewhere else, something better. Then she looked back at the bull, now silhouetted against another flash of lightning that turned the whole farm into a negative image for a split second — white grass, black sky, Buster caught mid-stride like a photograph.
Something in her chest loosened. She picked up her phone, opened the camera, and took one picture — not of herself, not of the bull, but of the empty sky between lightning strikes. The moment after, when the world holds its breath.
"My friends are gonna think I'm so extra for posting this," she said, but she was smiling.
"Yeah," Marisol grinned. "But you'll actually be there this time."