Struck | Mollie Hawkins
Sometimes, with his soft mouth wrapped around a forkful of potatoes au gratin with too much garlic, the tea kettle screaming on the burner, the smell of petrichor steaming through the open window—he’ll remember being struck by lightning.
He’ll drink a glass of water in two gulps, ice plonking against the bottom as he rests it silently on the table. He tells me it’s like the sound after a booming explosion, a shriek tickling the most sensitive parts of his inner ear. He’ll get another glass of water and tell me the rain was so hard that day, it gushed over his feet like he was rooted into a shallow lake.
He was running to his little blue Chevy, but only made it halfway before the sky rung his bell. That’s what he calls it—ringing his bell. He says it’s better to laugh than it is to cry, that I should be thankful nothing has ever happened to me that would change my personality. Nothing that he knows about, anyway. We have only been together for two years. There are some things better left unshared: the late nights in alley bars, the guy whose love language was a hand caged around my neck, the time a window shattered over my head as I tried to open it.
At night I run my fingers over his dark wavy hair, imagining a white heat over the parietal lobe that never fades. I imagine it must be hard, surviving. All that pressure to do something with yourself other than work at Piggly Wiggly. I’ll hear him on the phone with his mom, just saying I know, I know, I know, in low tones. I don’t ask.
He’ll hold my hand and I swear, there’s a static there that isn’t from the carpet. He’ll ask, do you think I’m the same as I was before? I say no, he’s better. Brighter than the track lighting in our apartment first thing in the morning. He’ll tell me how pretty I look, and I’ll know he’s lying—he has cataracts now, his left eye like a wall cloud—but he says it genuinely, as though he’s memorized some perfect version of me. I smile extra wide, baring my teeth. So I know he can see that I mean it.
Mollie Hawkins lives in Houston, by way of Alabama and California (it’s complicated). She is currently pursuing her MFA in Fiction at Bennington College Writing Seminars. Her work has appeared in Marie Claire, Salon, Bustle, Sprudge, HelloGiggles, PoemMemoirStory, and other journals. In her spare time she’s probably spilling coffee on herself. Visit Mollie at www.molliehawkins.com.