Like Lightning

Nancy is a woman plagued by sorrow, forced into a state of mania that leads her on a harrowing spiritual journey.

A part of her had always wanted it. Though she would never have admitted it, a deep, dark fragment of her being had always wanted to be the victim. She had glorified it, looked at it as a way to become a hero, to reach a state of spiritual tranquility that the peace of society could never provide. A part of her mind had been convinced that at some point in her life she would have to go through what she was going through that day in order to claim she had truly “lived.” However, as her mind and back crippled with exhaustion, she would have given anything to reclaim the naïve comfort she had always called home. She would have given up the serenity and dreaminess of the mountain view before her if that’s what it took, just as long as she could brew a cup of hot tea and watch the wheel of fortune again.

It had only been five days since she had left home. The thought of that reality made her hang her head in shame. She had thought she would last so much longer. Her wild imagination had painted pictures of her scouring the mountains like any other rugged mountaineer would, partaking in a movie-worthy journey that would lead her to whatever her destination was. She had thought that she would adapt to the forest life like a natural, claiming the earth as her playground and breaking free from the chains of society as only a world-class rebel would. But, instead she sat beneath a large pine tree, cowering like a child afraid of the dark. She stared off the cliff before her into the distance, trying to come to terms with the fact that her dream was fake. You could never live the life of a hero without cameras and microphones in your face every step of the way. It simply wasn’t possible.

She wondered what her kids were thinking. They had been so worried about her before she left, she could only imagine the fear that struck their heart when they found an empty house with nothing but a note to explain where her craziness had taken her. She could see the eyes of her youngest daughter fill with tears as she clasped a hand to her mouth, running to the arms of her older brother who gritted his teeth and looked angrily up at the ceiling, as if asking God why his mother had become so foolish. She could hear the voice of her other daughter on the phone with the police, demanding that they send search parties out right away, that her mother was depressed and lonely, and she needed help. If she didn’t get it soon, there’s no telling what she’d do to herself.

Nancy wiped a shaky hand across her forehead and looked vacantly up at the pure sky. A few clouds lazily drifted with the wind, but for the most part the entirety of all before her was a bright, baby blue. The sun was blazing, alighting what should have been the beautifully awe-inspiring landscape before her, but what was instead now the hell she had immersed herself in.

“Why’d you have to go?” She mumbled, handing her head and holding her hands on the back of her neck. “You made me do this, you know?”

Silence settled in the air as she waited for an answer, and a frustrated smirk erupted on her face before she shook her head. Why should she expect an answer? She had spent the last five days looking for them, and all she had come across were more questions.

“The plan was forever, Paul,” she grumbled, rolling her head on her shoulders so that her bloodshot eyes could look up to the heavens. “You were supposed to stay with me until we could die together. You didn’t even stick around long enough for us to have grandkids. Why would you do that to me?”

Then the tears came again. She had cried to so much in the last few days, she thought her body would be sick of it by now. Though she was overcome by a weakness that the mountains and her fears had plagued her with, she still somehow found enough strength to sob like a baby, cradling herself against the tree as she stared up towards the sun, asking God the questions that he refused to answer.

 

 

“God, why does she have to be like this?” Curtis growled with an angry snarl as he paced the floor before his sisters. Miranda sat cross-legged with a hand over her mouth. Her eyes were dry for the first time in hours, but the tears were just around the corner, and her siblings knew it. She watched the avid walking of her brother determinedly, not taking her eyes off his feet or opening her mouth to interrupt his angry rants.

“She’s always been this way,” Nelly told him, watching him stoically as she held her younger sister in her comforting arms.  

The air around them was stagnant and filled with an eerie emptiness it had never held before. It put all three of them on edge, and brought about a feeling of uneasiness that they found to be unexplainable.  

“I know, but she’s never acted on it before,” Curt replied. He let out a sigh and looked up at the ceiling, stopping in his tracks and allowing the house to be filled with silence. “Dad always kept her grounded, He always kept her anchored in our world. Now that he’s gone… Well, who knows what world she’s in now? She’s probably on cloud nine of la-la-land or something.”

“I doubt she’s on cloud nine of anything,” Nelly stated as images of her mother crying somewhere, lost and alone, flashed across her mind. “Mom loved Dad like nothing else. She needed him. Losing him must have been like losing a part of herself; anybody’s bound to go a little crazy after something like that.”

“Well, you shouldn’t go that crazy,” Curt snapped, resuming his pacing and throwing his hands in the air. “That’s why you go see a therapist. You get antidepressants if you need them. You grieve. It isn’t easy, but that’s what people are supposed to do. You’re supposed to face what happened, talk to people about it, and move on.”

“Mom isn’t most people,” Miranda murmured from beneath her hand.

“You’re right,” her brother barked, his pace quickening and his hands clenching into angry fists. “She isn’t. She’s even crazier than most people. Instead of doing what has been proven to help people get over a traumatic event like this, she packs her bags and runs off into the God damned forest like a maniac. Did she even think about anything before she did it? Did she think about her health, about the fact that she’s nearly 60 and suffering from arthritis? Did she think about how horrible it’d be to die out there? Did she even think about her own children?”

“You just don’t understand her,” Miranda interjected, furrowing her brows and pushing away from her sister’s arms. “People cope with things differently. For some people that ‘seven steps of grief’ crap doesn’t work at all. Some people need to do something crazy in order to be at peace. You should know by now that mom isn’t like everybody else, and it takes nearly psychotic things to make her feel better.”

“I know that!” Curt growled, spinning around to glare down at her. “I’m not saying that I didn’t expect this. I’m not saying that I’m surprised, or that she’s gone out of her mind. She’s always been out of her mind, and I know that! I’m just saying that I’m sick and tired of her being this way. She doesn’t think these things through. She runs off into the wilderness like she’s Tarzan or something, without giving it a second thought. She’s putting us all through pain, and she doesn’t even care. It’s not fair.”

“Dad dying wasn’t fair either,” Nelly added, shooting her brother a look to warn him away from Miranda. “None of this is fair. Life isn’t fair, Curtis. We can’t fix mom; she’s not some machine that you could tighten a few bolts in and call good to go. She needs time to heal.”

“Yeah, well, if she takes much more time she’s gonna die out there,” He mumbled, turning away from his sister to look out the window. The view from their mother’s mansion was breathtaking, a mountain side laden with pine trees and an expanse of endless sky to cushion it all. Why would her solution to her problems be to leave it all? “I just don’t get it. I don’t get her.”

“You never have,” murmured Miranda. “Neither did Dad. Nobody ever got her. Why do you think she poured herself into her writing so much? Why do you think that her entire personality would change with every book she wrote? Don’t you see? The only people that get her are the characters in her stories. She won’t ever talk to anybody or open herself up because she doesn’t have to; she has entire towns, cities, hell, maybe even countries of people who understand her. She’s their freaking queen. She lives her crazy fantasies through them. Now that dad’s gone, she needs to immerse herself in another fantasy to replace this reality.”

Nelly shook her head. “That doesn’t make any sense, Miranda. She’s gone through plenty of tough things before, and she never did anything like this. And she talked to dad about things all the time; she opened up to certain people. She wasn’t a closed book entirely.”

“You’re right, she talked to dad,” Miranda replied. “And where is he now? Now she has nobody to talk to, because Dad was the only person she’d let in. So who is she supposed to open up to now? She had nobody that she’d let in, nobody who knew she was crazy and accepted it. And she’s done some other crazy a*s stuff, Nelly. Don’t you remember when Grandpa died? She ran off to New York City for a week. Dad told us it was a ‘spa vacation’ with her sisters, but it wasn’t, and we know it. Her sisters didn’t even go with. She ran off to New York City, just like that character in one of her books… What was the name?”

“Alone With the Sun,” Curtis murmured, his back still to the girls and his eyes still glued to the window. “It was Beatrice, wasn’t it?”

“I think so.”

Curt hung his head and rubbed at his eyes. “That was my favorite one of all her books.”

There was a moment of unsettling silence as the three of them tried to keep their minds from wandering into another realm.

“Well, she lived that fantasy, didn’t she?” Interrupted Miranda, breaking the quiet and yanking them all back into reality. “When we were kids she was telling us how a part of her always wanted to see the big city even though she knew she’d hate it. So, when Grandpa died, that was how she coped. She got over the pain by immersing herself in a dream instead of a nightmare. The same happened when she had that miscarriage and she ran off to Oklahoma. Dad told us she was visiting relatives, but we don’t have family down there. She was drinking her time away at those sleezy honky-tonks, just like she was some southern bell she never got to be.”

“Goodbye Oklahoma,” Nelly admitted with a slight nod.

“Exactly. She lived that fantasy too. All of her writing, every book and story is just a dream down on paper. And right now she’s living one of her craziest.”

“I don’t remember her ever writing a book about some crazy dumbass who runs off into the wilderness after something bad happens to her,” grumbled Curt.

“That’s because it hasn’t been published yet,” Miranda replied. “It’s a big pile of papers next to her computer right now. I found it the other day when she was in town. She hasn’t even finished it yet, it’s just sitting there. The main character’s name is Nancy and everything this time. It’s like she already knows how this whole situation is gonna go, she just needs to find out how it’s gonna end.”

Curt turned around slowly in his spot and shot Nelly a look.

“You guys can go see it for yourselves if you want,” Miranda encouraged frustratingly. “It’s sitting right on her desk.”

 

 

She was waiting for that “ah-ha” moment. She was waiting for it to all make sense. Her entire life she had been convinced that she’d get it all in the end. Right before she opened death’s door and walked towards whatever was waiting for her, she’d understand it all. She would be completely immersed in the answers. They’d wash over her like the waves of a stormy sea, engulfing her entirely and dragging her down into the depths of pure enlightenment, where all of her worries, stresses, fears and guilt could be settled.

She felt as though death had already taken half of her heart, and yet it seemed that, not only had she gotten no answers, she had lost any answers she believed she had had before. Now she sat, withered, pained, and alone beneath a pine tree, staring off into the distance with tears streaming down her face, wondering how she had ever ended up here. What was wrong with her that she always seemed to find herself in bad situations without any recollection as to how it had gotten so bad?

“If I get back, this is gonna be one damn good book,” she murmured to herself with a smile, resting the back of her head against the tree trunk and watching the clouds roll by.

But even she knew she wasn’t doing it for a book. Her books were just papers to her. They were nothing but pages with black scribbles on them. When she was still young and naïve they had seemed like the world to her; the words inside them were the words of her soul, the pages understood her better than she understood herself, but, at that point in time, nothing could understand her.

She began to wonder why she had done anything that she had done. Why had she gotten married in the first place? Paul was a basket case to begin with. Heart problems ran in the family. He smoked too much. The odds were stacked against her; she was bound to live longer than him. Signing into that relationship was no more than agreeing to the pain. She had said “I do” to the future heartache and suffering, then put a ring on her finger to make it all seem alright.

She dropped her head in her hands and let out a long groan. Why had she even had kids? They were bound to end up the same as Paul. They were going to reach the same fate as her. All five of them were going to be nothing more than dust in the ground someday. All of their accomplishments, memories, and dreams were going to die with them. Why had she forced life upon others when she knew how it was going to end for them?

She felt like she had been sitting beneath that pine trees for days, yet the sun had hardly shifted at all in the sky. At that point she was begging it to come already. She had been ready to die since she had found him lying on the kitchen floor. She had been looking for death when she ran off into the forest, claiming to be searching only for answers. And she had decided to grab death by the collar and take it’s scythe as her own when she had taken her place beneath that pine tree. At that point she was nothing more than a broken soul being forced into the act of living, and, to her, it was more painful than even the most gruesome death. She was able to do nothing but drown her heart in sorrows and lament over everything that life had plagued her with. 

Why had she ever been forced to live in the first place? What had she ever done wrong? Life was full of pain, heartache, sorrow, torture, and death. People try to cover up these misfortunes with beliefs that one can attain true happiness, even though everyone knows that that isn’t even truly possible, and that is why they say you should be happy with what you’ve got. That you’re blessed to even be alive. But why is it a blessing? Why would something plagued with death, grief and distress be a blessing?

Nancy threw her head in the air and let out a scream. She wanted the thoughts to go away; she wanted the cynicism to find some other pour soul to torment. Her whole life had been nothing but these thoughts, questions running through her mind, ringing in her ears with “what ifs” and “whys.” She was ready to say goodbye to these nuisances forever, even if she didn’t get the answers she had been searching for for years.

She slapped her hand to her forehead and let out a sigh. “God, I could really use a drink right about now.” It had been four years since she had quieted those little voices in her head. Four years too long.

“Nancy,” a tired voice groaned from the doorway. “What are you still doing up?”

Her fingers fell away from the keyboard of her computer and went right for the drink beside it. “I’m not tired,” she grumbled, letting the whiskey roll down her throat like a ball of fire.

“Nancy,” the voice grew quiet, and her husband soon stood behind her with his hands on her shoulders. “You need to stop this. You need to stop all of this. You’re too old to be doing this. I’m too old to have to deal with it.”

Nancy set the glass down gently and stared at the screen of her computer. The book that she had been writing at that very moment had went on to be a bestseller. What had he known? Without the whiskey those words wouldn’t have come out the same. “I’m not hurting anyone,” she grumbled. “It helps me, Paul. Without it I’m in pain. Do you want me to be in pain?”

“You never used to be like this,” he argued. “You used to be happy and vibrant and…”

“Young,” she interjected with an irritated snarl. “I was young, Paul. Both of us were young. When you’re young you’re like that. You’re happy and alive and bright and all of that s**t. But what about when you get old, Paul? What about then?” She shook his hand off her shoulder and stood up from her desk, spinning around to look at him, grabbing the edge of her desk for support.

“Who says you can’t be happy?” Paul asked. “Why wouldn’t you? Aren’t you happy here? Aren’t you happy with me?”

Nancy’s anger dissipated as she became lost in her husband’s swirling, blue eyes, and she averted her gaze to the floor in shame. “It’s not that,” she whispered. “It’s not you. It’s not this home. It’s none of this… This is all I’ve ever wanted.”

“Then why are you doing this to yourself?” He asked, resting a hand on the chair and taking a step closer to her. She felt the unsettling urge to kiss him as he drew closer to her. She wanted to leap into his arms again like they had never stopped being 25. She wanted to pretend to turn back time. “We have a beautiful home, three successful children, and a wonderful life together. Why do you feel like you need to turn to this?”

Nancy slowly looked up at the man she loved and shrugged her shoulders, trying her hardest to keep back the tears that threatened to fall. “I can’t explain it, Paul. I need it. I just do. I need it like you need to smoke.”

Paul let out a frustrated chuckle and looked away. “That’s not the same thing, Nancy, and you know it.”

Then a silence came like a war cry, tearing a space between them as Paul made his way for the door. Before he left he turned around and looked at her. “You and I are going to go to an AA meeting tomorrow night, whether you like it or not. And, if you don’t go, then you might as well go anywhere else but here, because I can’t live with this anymore.”

With that, one tear had won its way down her cheek.

Paul saw it and let out a guilty sigh. “You know I love you, Nancy. I do, I really do, I always have, and I always will. But you can’t live like this anymore, and neither can I. I can’t just sit back and watch you drink your life away. You have so much yet to live.”

Another tear fell, and it received no more than a cursory glance before Paul left her and went back to bed. The thought of him leaving her was more than she could bear. There would not be enough Whiskey in the world to heal the wound he would leave her with. She eased herself back into her desk chair and spent several minutes just sitting there, her tired eyes slowly shifting from the computer screen to the glass at its side. Taking one more pained sip of the elixir she had come to love so much, she turned to her keyboard and let the words of her soul run free, filling the pages with sentences of torment and anguish, creating a masterpiece that only misery could have brought her.

 

 

The room was filled with an eerie and unsettling silence. Miranda, Curt and Nelly sat in the front pew, staring vacantly at the casket that stood before them. It loomed over the room like death itself, demanding respect, forcing people into an unnerving quiet.

Suddenly a hand was touching Miranda gently on her shoulder. With blood-streaked eyes she turned to face the old woman that gazed at the three siblings with a frown of pity. “My prayers are with you three,” She whispered. “To lose your father one day and your mother the next… You three are in God’s hands now. Blessings be with you.”

Nelly looked away without saying a word, disgusted at the constant pity the three of them were forced to accept. Curtis and Miranda thanked the woman before she walked away, and without a word they resumed their position, staring at the box that held the body of their mother, unable to do, say, or even think anything.

“Why us?” Miranda finally murmured after a couple minutes of agonizing silence. “Why did we have to lose them both?”

“Everything happens for a reason,” Curt grumbled without averting his eyes from the casket at the front of the church. “We can’t turn back time, we’ve just gotta get over it.”

“But why’d she have to go like she did?” Miranda whined, grabbing her brother by the hand and hanging her head to hide her tears. “It should have gone differently. She should have made it back. She should have had some sort of epiphany or something and came back a changed woman; a hero. It all should have ended differently.”

Curt glanced over at his little sister and squeezed her hand tighter. She looked eight again; her long, brown hair covering her face as she sat in a corner crying because some kid pushed her off the swing. Now, twenty years later, she was still crying about being pushed down, except that this time it wasn’t some kid, and Curt couldn’t hunt him down and push him back. This time there was nothing he could do to heal the hurt of the little girl crying before him. This time all he could do is cry along with her. “This isn’t how the story should end,” he mumbled, “this isn’t right.”

“We don’t know how the story ended,” Miranda interjected, her voice hoarse and weak. “Us sitting here right now, this is the epilogue. We know the beginning and middle of it, but we don’t know the end. For all we know she found God wherever she was. For all we know she took Death by the hand and walked alongside him into the clouds. Just because she’s dead doesn’t mean that the story ended in the wrong way. Maybe this was exactly how she wanted it to go.”

Curt and Nelly sat in silence, gazing over at their older sister without murmuring a word.

Miranda finally looked back over them and let out a soft sigh. “I finished her book.”

The air of the church grew still as the Reverend walked down the aisle towards the casket. The three of them turned away from each other and averted their attention to the man before them.

“You’ll like the ending,” Miranda whispered through the corner of her mouth, her gaze unwavering. “I promise.”

 

Death was at her front door, she could feel it. She could look through the peephole and see him looming outside, scythe at his side and his hand balled up into a fist, prepared to knock. Now she was just waiting for the moment to come.

She was waiting for the booming of his knocks to reverberate through her being. It would come like a thunderstorm; three pangs of heart wrenching thunder before the lightning came.

 For a second the world would be alight; all would be seen.

 For a second there would be no shadows, no secrets, and no places to hide. This second would be fleeting, but it would last just long enough to fill her with the understanding she had so long yearned for. And, when the second had passed, the shadows and the secrets would creep back again, and the world would go black. She knew exactly how it would all go, she was just waiting for it to happen already.

The mossy ground she sat upon would be her grave, and the pine tree she leaned against would be her tombstone. She had spent hours engraving “Nancy Frankford: May she forever rest in peace in the land of her dreams,” into the bark directly above her head. Now, with her prayer forever carved into the only world she had ever really known, she was nothing more than a soul agonizingly trapped in the decrepit body that had been her prison for nearly sixty years.

She stared off at the mountains vacantly, eyes bloodshot and empty, watching helplessly as the sun set beneath the snow topped ridges and left her surrounded by a blanket of darkness. Then, just before being forced into enduring another cold night of misery and solitude, the thunder came.

Each pang rocked the world around her like an earthquake. Her heart was nearly beating out of her chest, and her brain echoed with waves of agonizing pain.  She wasn’t able to emit a sound, but her body convulsed and forced her face-first into the ground where she lay like a corpse, eyes wide with torture and tears filled with hurt. The thunder rang in her ears, forcing unbearable tremors to reverberate from her head to her toes in eerily fluid waves.

Then, without warning, the lightning came, giving way to light and forcing out the pain. Though it only lasted for a second, she was able to bask in the glow for what seemed like an eternity. A newfound strength lifted her to her feet so that she could gaze out at the glorious new world with wide and baffled eyes.

From the sky to the valleys in between the towering mountains, all was alight; there was not a single shadow or even a spec of darkness to shroud the beauty that unraveled. Everything glared a blinding white, and she could see straight through the mountains, the canyons, and the oceans that lay before her as though all was nothing more than a transparent illusion. The entirety of the world sat right before her, filling her with the overwhelming sensation that would have killed her had she not been so close to death. Everything was hers to see, and her head boomed with all that was before her.

It was her “ah-ha” moment. It all finally made sense. Not a word had to be spoken and not a thing had to be explained, all she had to do was look down from the precipice where she stood at the answers that lay down below. She was washed over with a sudden understand, and in the blink of an eye everything made sense.

A trembling smile overtook her, and she found herself to be a new woman.  The decrepit carcass that had been her home had left her, and she was nothing more than a soul, pure and peaceful, standing at the edge of all she had ever known, waiting patiently for Death to come and guide her away.

And, without notice, her second was over. The flame that had alighted the world flickered momentarily and then went out forever. The shadows and the secrets came flooding back, and the land before her was shrouded in a cape of darkness. Her smile, however, didn’t waver in the slightest. And when she felt the warm touch of Death take her hand, she went along willingly, taking each step slowly but confidently. For the first time in what she had known, she was utterly and entirely unafraid.

 

 

Reviews

[barleygirl]

Your story addresses common feelings & life events, but the way you made this into a collection of vignettes made it unique & unexpected. There was never a point when I thought I knew what would happen next. I found some of your characters were acting in boringly predictable ways, at times, but for the most part, the responses to things were realistic for the situations. I really loved the opening, where the mother realized she wasn't King Kong, out there in the woods (very true to life). I also loved the way you wove the mother's stories into this real-life account of the end of her life. Also, your ending was very original & slightly surreal, but believable. Good job, with excellent writing thru-out.

[Wolfwind Words]

Some people say that a good story can grab a reader in the first paragraph... I was grabbed. Your words and your style built the characters from mere mists of nothing, into solid entities that reverberated with energy inside the plot. Each character, masterfully unique and captivating in their own simple way. The plot was smooth, it began gently and lived dynamically and ended gently, as all good plots should.

What I really enjoyed about this story, was how it left the end unknown until the last portion, yet did so without suspense. That even flow style is riviting, for it doesn't through the mind or the heart around, it simply allows everything to manifest with every new line. The end comes along with the reader both bound up, yet outside of the moment. Overall, it gives a reflective quality that one simply can sit back and ponder their own footsteps.

Two Thumbs Up!
Aaron

[Megan]

Thank you so much for this insight!

[Parker101]

good i like this keep it up

[mou]

hey Megan!you have done a fantastic word.Though i am more fond of poem but your tagline fetch me here to read it.

[A. Amos]

Capturing and sharply crafted, I was hooked from the very first line. Your emotional depicting was eloquent, looking forward to buy your sign copy....awesome!