The Rocket Garden: Chapter 1

1

I stood and stared up at the storm, into flashes of lightning like hot metal poured on the cracked hammer of the sky. Water rose around my ankles while the rain fell and filled the streets. It sizzled off the bodies lying out, draped out windows, and piled in doorways. It pooled in their open mouths and smacked their eyelids shut.
I awoke at a burst of thunder, blinking, rain blowing against the windows. A rush of wind rattled the panes. She was talking through the kitchen door, over the sound of the faucet.
She’d been moving steadily for the last half hour, throwing her bags around, needing a drink, needing to sit, talking about this, about that, about her trip, about going into the kitchen for another drink and finding nothing to eat. She cut the water and shouted to change my t-shirt and jeans so we could go out and get something. She asked if I was drunk already.
I lay on the couch, nodding, staring off. I was wondering how long I’d been out while she was talking. The clock on the wall said five to six but that didn’t help; I hadn’t looked at it before closing my eyes.
More thunder rode through, shifting the ice in my drink. I plucked it off the coffee table and shook some in my mouth. Crunching it, looking up at the ceiling, then down at my bare feet propped on the end. I wiggled my toes. I swung my legs and sat up, setting my drink almost perfectly back in its water ring.
The refrigerator door opened in there. She said something about the storm as I went over to the window, cranking my shoulder and looking for myself. Five floors down, horns went, stop and start, stop and start for rush hour, lights showing in creamy white and yellow spirals through the rain. Thin, staticky sheets that seethed on the pavement. For a summer storm, it looked heavy and cold.
Gusts of it swept past in the shape of large, blown sails, wobbling the glass again. I looked up at more thunder, the sun sealed behind a cloak of black clouds. Flares of washed purple and pink fought within them.
Down on the street, a taxi was rounding the corner. There was man trying to hail it, hat in his fist. A woman crossed the street toward him, teetering on her too tall heels, reaching around to pinch the wet skirt off her legs. People leaned into the sidewalk as they pulled open lobby doors and ducked inside; others pushed through on the way out, tugging their collars up, shielding themselves from the wind.
Bodies stood at their windows in the office across from me, staring out. I stepped back and put a thumb on the glass, blotting out a face, then another with my index, then another and another. I smiled because I figured they each had a certain look, some look about whatever they were seeing and I could just squeeze it off.
I turned as she elbowed through the swing door, drying her hands on a rag. She stopped at the end table to turn a small picture frame more toward the room. I looked back at my palm on the glass, those faces still trapped behind my fingers. Corner of my eye, I watched her flop the rag on her shoulder and cross her arms. She didn’t look at me, she just stood straight up and down and stared at the window. Past the window, outside at the rain, maybe.
Whatever she was about to say, with her eyes like that, a slow breath going in through her nose, was going to have to be something she took with her. I think she looked disappointed, but I’d never really gotten the hang of her, so I can’t honestly say.
But she did look at me one more time. She looked right at me, her mouth opening and whatever it was got its first syllable between her lips. The air boomed low, the picture flapping down as the floor hummed.
Then she turned away and gave the door a light punch, back into the kitchen. I kept watching the street from under my arm. The sky lit up in a tangled fuss, and it seemed that everything stopped, stunned in the blast. I stared down through the rain, held in mid-air, like a scatter of pebbles across the sky.
Everyone dropped to the ground.
There was no crush of sound like wailing traffic or explosions or fighting. It was just…over. Vaguely, I realized the lightning hadn’t finished its flash, that this moment was locked in my head, too encompassing, too vast to be experienced in real time.
The frozen bolt stood like a spear slammed out of the clouds, the edges of buildings and clogged streets reduced to half-erased sketches under the glare. There was no concrete down there, no ground. Aside from the few scratches and swipes I could make out, there were only cars and boiling rain and all those bodies. Caught in the storm; lost as it crashed to earth.
It was so quiet.
I was still pushing my hand on the glass, harder now, making it bow a bit beneath my fingers. The tips were white, but I didn’t take it down. Instead, I turned my head slowly, toward the kitchen.