flight 663

Sharing the sky with a cloud that has lightning in its belly. Watching from my window, maybe an arm’s length away, maybe a mile, lightning collects its charge from wet air and sets the sky ablaze. It’s twenty minutes after sunset. The sky is royal blue, and graying with age. A huge mushroom cloud spreads from my nose to the horizon, high as Jack’s bean stalk, casting a seamless shadow over half a city. It explodes with light. It snaps, spreads, snaps again. A city lights up, then darkens. Lightning is a tag team in the moist caverns of my eerie neighbor. An enormous whirl of white fairy floss, a violence raging in its trickling, suspended dome. Machine guns, cannons, booby traps, all going off, all now, explosion after explosion outside my window. CNN wishes it was here. I have night vision. I have lightning vision. I have fear of wars. The lightning wants blood. We are running away at 300 miles an hour.