The Lightning Season

The cable snapped somewhere between the 42nd and 43rd floor, sending Marco's scaffolding into a sickening arc against the unfinished side of the Luxor Tower. He caught himself on a rusted beam, heart hammering against ribs that had grown too fragile for this work at fifty-three years old.

Down below, the foreman—some kid named Ryan who couldn't be thirty—shouted something Marco couldn't hear through the wind. He'd been doing this since before Ryan was born, since the accident that took his left ring finger and his marriage both. He stared at his gloved hands, remembering how Elena had left him the same week he'd fallen from the pyramid-shaped casino in Vegas. Said she couldn't watch him die in slow motion anymore.

His phone buzzed in his pocket—his daughter, again. Probably another reminder about the baseball tournament this weekend. He hadn't picked up a glove since Tommy was six, since the cancer. Some things you didn't touch twice.

The storm broke over the city as Marco descended to the freight elevator. Lightning splintered the sky into white-blue fractures, illuminating the construction site like the flash of a camera capturing something you wished stayed unexposed. That was when he saw her—the structural engineer with the sharp eyes and sharp mouth, standing in the downpour with a clipboard in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She reminded him of the sphinx he'd seen in Egypt once, before the injuries and the drinking and the life that had somehow accumulated around him like sediment.

'You gonna stand there getting electrocuted,' she said, more statement than question, 'or you gonna help me figure out why this whole fucking thing is going to collapse?'

Marco laughed, bitter and genuine both at once. 'Honey, this whole thing was always going to collapse. Just a matter of when.'

She handed him the clipboard. 'Make yourself useful then.'

The storm raged as they worked in companionable silence, two people who'd seen enough of the world's indifference to find comfort in its predictability. For the first time in years, Marco thought about calling his daughter back. Maybe he'd even buy a glove.