The Lightning's Shadow

Mira stood at the window, watching the lightning stitch itself across the August sky like surgical scars opening on darkness. The storm had been threatening all day, heavy with the kind of pressure that pressed against your temples and made your thoughts feel too loud for your own skull.

Behind her, Richard moved through the kitchen like a zombie—not the cinematic kind with their desperate hunger, but the living sort, the ones who'd somehow forgotten they were alive somewhere around year seven of marriage, or maybe after the third promotion that came with longer hours and shorter conversations. He poured coffee that had long since gone cold, his movements practiced and empty, the kind of automatic motion that happens when you've stopped paying attention to what your hands are doing.

She remembered the bear they'd encountered on that camping trip in Yellowstone, how they'd both frozen, adrenaline flooding their veins with something sharper and more real than anything they'd felt in years. The bear had looked at them with indifferent amber eyes, then turned away, uninterested in their smallness. Later, in the tent, they'd clung to each other with a desperation that felt like survival.

Now, the dog—Buster, elderly and arthritic—slept at Richard's feet, and somehow the animal seemed more present, more aware of being alive, than either of them. Buster had been a puppy then, wild and useless during the bear encounter, barking himself hoarse at something that could have crushed them all without noticing.

Mira pressed her forehead to the cool glass. She'd been swimming in this particular ocean of resentment for so long she'd forgotten what it felt like to touch bottom. The marriage wasn't dead, exactly—that would have been a kindness. It was undead, walking and talking and paying bills, but hollowed out by the thousand tiny decisions not to see, not to speak, not to reach.

The lightning flashed again, illuminating Richard's reflection in the glass. He was looking at her, she realized. For the first time in months, maybe years, he was really looking at her.

"Mira?" he said, and the sound of her name in his mouth was like a bell tolling underwater. "Are you happy?"

The question hung there, suspended in the charged air between them. Outside, thunder cracked open the world.

"I don't know," she said, and it was the truest thing she'd spoken in years. "I think I forgot how to tell."

The dog shifted in his sleep, dreaming of running. The storm broke, rain finally releasing its held breath against the roof. Somewhere in that moment, something began to either die or be born—she couldn't tell which.