The Last Storm

Elias adjusted his hard hat, the sweatband already soaked through despite the predawn chill. Three decades of climbing utility poles, and his knees still complained every time. Some things you don't get used to.

"You good, Eli?" Maya called from below. She was twenty-five, fierce, too talented to be stuck repairing rural grid failures in the middle of nowhere.

"Just old," he muttered, wrapping the safety cable around his harness. "Just old."

The storm was rolling in from the west — a wall of bruised purple clouds. The radio crackled with weather warnings. Lightning had already struck two substations. They were racing against the storm, trying to restore power to the valley before the worst hit.

Water began to fall, first as drops, then sheets. Elias felt the cold through his slicker, seeping into bones that remembered every injury from twenty years of doing this alone. Maya made the climb look effortless, young and certain in a way he'd forgotten how to be.

The downed line was tangled in the oak's branches, still live. Elias's hands knew the motions before his mind caught up. The cable cutter made its familiar snap, and suddenly he was falling.

The safety harness caught. He swung hard against the trunk, all breath leaving his body. Below him, Maya screamed his name.

Lightning struck the transformer fifty yards away. The world turned white, then purple, then somehow more vivid than before. The rain hammered down like it was trying to wash something clean.

Elias hung there, suspended, heart hammering against ribs that had somehow held together through cancer and divorce and every other kind of destruction life had thrown at him. He thought about letting go.

Then Maya was there, lowering herself down to him, wrapping her arms around his harness like she could anchor him with her body alone.

"I've got you," she said. "You're not done yet, old man."

And for the first time in years, he thought maybe she was right.