The Lightning Between Us

The spinach was wilting in the colander, much like everything else in their marriage. Maya watched the water drip through dark green leaves, counting the seconds until David would shuffle through the front door, another day of moving through life like a zombie, present but utterly hollow.

"You're doing it again," she whispered to the cat, Luna, who wound around her ankles with demanding affection. At least the cat still remembered how to want something.

David arrived at 7:14, as he had for twelve years. He placed his briefcase by the door, hung his coat, and moved toward her with the familiar automatic press of lips to her cheek—missed by an inch, as usual. His eyes were flat, drained of whatever spark had once drawn her to him in that crowded bar two decades ago.

"Spinach again," he noted, not really asking.

"It's good for us."

"Everything's good for us. Everything's necessary. Vitamins, check-ups, savings accounts." He opened the refrigerator, staring blindly at its contents. "Sometimes I feel like I've been dead for years and nobody told me."

Maya's hand tightened around the colander. This was the closest they'd come to honesty in months.

"The lightning strike," she said suddenly.

He turned. "What?"

"Remember? The camping trip, seventh year. The storm. That lightning strike split the tree fifty feet from our tent and you grabbed me and I thought—that was it, that was the moment." She set down the spinach. "I think I've been waiting for the lightning ever since."

David's shoulders slumped. Something cracked behind his eyes—dried mud giving way to water. "I thought you stopped loving me that night. I thought you realized I wasn't enough to keep you interested forever."

"Oh, David." Maya reached for him. "I'm not bored. I'm bereft."

He caught her hand, his thumb pressing into her palm. Luna darted between them, mowing for dinner, indifferent to human despair. David laughed—a real laugh, rusty and surprised.

"She doesn't care about our existential crisis. She just wants her salmon."

Maya stepped closer. "Maybe that's the lesson. Maybe we've been trying to be people when we should have been cats. Just present. Just hungry."

"Just alive," he said, and pulled her in.

Outside, summer lightning fractured the sky, brief and brilliant and terrifying—a reminder that destruction and revelation were often the same thing. The spinach sat forgotten on the counter as they stood in their kitchen, holding each other as the storm broke, finally struck.