THE LIGHTNING FLASH

The weather has become dreadfully predictable whilst a boy grows up...

It was the bleakest of days. Winds, stirred into being in far off lands and over foreign oceans, whipped from the shore in an unseemly frenzy and tore into the land. The skies overhead maintained a heavy, leaden appearance and, from time to time, deposited some of their moisture in wind-straggled torrents, soaking man and beast and swelling rivers until they burst. This was a season wetter than all other seasons, and a day more foul.

And on that bleakest of days a child was born.

It wasn't a Christ child or any pseudo-alien child, just a normal baby with normal appetites and normal everything. But it was, none-the-less, a special baby. It survived in a world where many died. And even as a suckling it had big ideas, way beyond its humble station in life.

The bleakest of days turned into the bleakest of weeks, and then into the bleakest of months. Some devil, the people said, had taken over the weather and changed it from the benevolent summers that had smiled on land and folk alike into one long overcast agony of desolation. The rain spilled both day and night and there was talk of building arks.

Somewhere, nobody could tell where, an ancient bell seemed to toll. Maybe it was a real cracked bell cast in a foundry long ago at the dawn of time, or maybe it was the winds shrieking through human minds until they rang with a miserable, bell-like echo. But it resonated everywhere, and the folks covered their ears and they still heard it. It was, they said, the knell of doom.

And it was in this world, this bleak and terrible world, that the baby turned from baby to man as the wet years rolled along. Slowly, as the weeks and months and years passed by, he grew.

And then, one day, he was a man - and on that day the winds blew the clouds away and the sun shone through. It was hard to believe. There were many that had never seen the sun save in parables and old tales, or images in tatty old story books. And here it was, big and gorgeous and warming in the skies.

There were celebrations to herald the return of that sun. Parties were arranged, beers and wines delivered, food piled on cracked or chipped plates on trestle tables in the open air, music organised with pipers and strings with girls in really tiny skirts holding violin or viola bows, and big bass drums attended to by hairy and hoary masters, and under a starlit sky one huge party began.

Young men and their tender sweet ladies would dance wild dances whilst old timers looked on, and nodded and smiled and tapped their hands to wild beating rhythms. And as the music became more frenetic, as those rhythms became wilder and more abandoned, scraps of clothing would be discarded and the young dancers would whoop their nakedness in a challenge to the stars �" and the old timers would smile broader smiles, and nod their heads with greater vigour. And shadowed corners would hide secrets, wonderful secrets of love and hope for a grand future as pearl semen flowed in tiny rivers like never before.

He, the baby-turned-into-a-man, saw the fun and the games and he devised a plan. He wanted the people, his neighbours, his friends, his family, to all be happy all the time but he was sure of one thing: the sun would go away again. It would have to, because that's what the weather made the sun do. And the bleak days would return. The partying people would go back to their homes, shivering and holding sad and weathered umbrellas. The wines and beers would all be gone. The cracked plates piled with food would lie empty on trestle tables down empty streets. Tumbleweeds would drift, silently, by, wet and hopeless.

And the good times would be gone.

He must do something about it.

If the people liked parties, he would give them cause to party. If they needed a focus for their joy then he would provide one. And his joy would need no sun to awaken it, his parties would require no freak weather to bring them into being. They would need one precious ingredient.

“Gather round, my friends,” he called, and they did gather round, for his voice had the power of command.

“The sun will go again,” he told them, “and the darkest and dreariest days will return. There will be endless weeks of rain, floods will roll across the fertile land, and we will all go hungry just like we did so recently. But I have a plan.”

“Tell us, oh child-become-man,” they clamoured, “what must we do in order to have parties in the rain and celebrations when the winds smite our lands?”

He smiled benevolently at them.

And from somewhere way in the skies, he couldn't tell exactly where, a searing shaft of lightning jagged down and fried him just as he was uttering the word “God”...

But the word was lost in chaos as the boy-turned-man evaporated in a cloud of instantly and horribly burned atoms...