I was paralyzed, I think, helpless to do anything but watch as the ball fell to the floor. I heard a huge noise: an explosion of some sort, like a shotgun. I thought of the ice that had ricocheted off the roof when my mother drove away. Death sound. The thud of what cannot be stopped. For a second I thought, It’s the end of the world . My world, I meant. In a way this was true. In a matter of seconds, everything changed. If I had turned left instead of right, perhaps it wouldn’t have happened; if the fly I’d swatted had never come in through a hole in the screen, if I’d never left New Jersey, if a butterfly in South America had never unfurled its wings and with a single beat altered everything, now and forevermore.
When I awoke in the hospital I knew at least part of my wish had come true. I could taste it, the burning flavor of death. The wish I’d made in the car traveling down to Florida had accomplished half of its mission, but I was still half alive. I couldn’t move my left side. Arms, legs, trunk, had all been affected. There hadn’t been a multi-organ disruption — no kidney or lung effects. But my heart had been affected and there had been neurological damage, the two most frequent causes of mortalities in lightning-strike victims. All the same, I was informed that I was lucky to be in Orlon, where there were more lightning strikes than anywhere else in Florida — glorious Florida, the top state for deaths and injuries caused by lightning. Because of this, the medical care in our county was expert. I was supposed to be grateful for that. I would need physical therapy and a serious relationship with a cardiologist, since my heart now skipped a beat. I could feel it fluttering inside me — torn posterior pericardium, they said. It was as though a bird were trapped inside me, one that belonged in a place outside the cage of my aching ribs.