Flash in the night

Deep in the night there was a distant flash of light that I only peripherally registered while tossing in my sleep. Seconds later, a wind burst into my room, dampening my face and knocking both of my windows off their moorings, thrashing them against the house.

The accompanying rain was so dense and penetrating as to be maddening – pure sheets of rain created a cacophony of sound that was disorienting. The kind of rain that, when it was over, would leave behind a silence that would make one feel alone in the world.

Lightening struck bright and close, filling my room with light; at times seeming to ripple along the belly of the clouds directly above my house, casting shadows one way in my room and then the next. At others, light entered opposite windows with simultaneous flashes, presumably filling the cloud hanging over my house with a deadly glow.

Thunder boomed ominously, as though bombs were exploding above; this same thunder only moments before had sounded like a cannon nearby, and before that like a distant riffle. In my experience, lightening is often muted by thunder, but now they happened simultaneously, somewhere over the tin roof of my house.

And just as the storm entered through one window, it passed through my room and kept on going, stretching out over the lake, and I feared for the fishermen as I watched their lamps flicker nervously on the horizon.