One of my favorite features of the house was the bank of windows lining the west wall of the living room. Most summer evenings the living room stayed bright enough to read in until after eight. Tonight, seven o’clock was dark as midnight—blackness punctuated by blinding flashes of lightning, which lit the room like a flash gun, searing a negative afterimage onto my retinas. Reflexively, ever since childhood, I’d been in the habit of counting the seconds between the lightning’s flash and the thunder’s boom: “one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi…” If I got to “five Mississippi” before the thunder rolled over me, I knew the lightning was a mile away. Within minutes after this evening’s storm broke, I found myself lucky to get through “one Mississippi”; sometimes I didn’t make it even through the “one.”
Then came a flash so bright, accompanied by a boom so loud, that I was sure the house itself had been hit dead on. When my vision returned, I saw a brief shower of sparks from a utility pole out by the street, and I knew that part of the boom was the sound of the electrical transformer on the pole exploding. I glanced at the face of my DVD player for confirmation and saw that the numerals had gone dark. I figured it might be a while before the power came back on, so I felt my way to the kitchen, opened the drawer beside the refrigerator, and fished around until I felt the box of wooden matches. I could have gone to the bedroom and retrieved the flashlight from the nightstand instead, but the idea of the flashlight beam, harsh and impersonal, made me choose the matches. They were the old-fashioned strike-anywhere kind—the kind you can strike on a stone fireplace, or a zipper, or even with your thumbnail if you’re daring and dexterous. I’d always preferred them to the kind you have to strike on the box—I liked getting to choose where to strike them, maybe, or liked the look of the red match heads tipped with white—but it was getting harder and harder to find this sort these days. The grocery store had stopped carrying them; the only place I knew where to buy them anymore was Parker Brothers, an old-style hardware store run by old-fashioned guys—guys like me, I supposed. Funny, I thought, people think nothing of careening through freeway traffic at ninety miles an hour, weaving in and out with a foot of clearance between their bumper and the next car’s. But God forbid we should do something as risky as strike a wooden match on a fireplace brick.
I felt my way into the living room, where an oil lamp—its glass chimney and base grimy to the touch—occupied a dusty spot on the mantel. Lifting the chimney free of the metal clips that held it in place, I set it on the mantel beside the base, then slid open the matchbox and removed one of the square wooden matches. I pressed the tip lightly against the surface of a brick above the mantel, then dragged the match upward. As it scratched across the rough surface, it gave off a small shower of sparks, then bloomed into a dazzling flower of yellow and blue. Once the flame shrank to a small teardrop of yellow, I touched it to the lamp’s wick, which took the flame and amplified it.
I tucked the box of matches into my pocket and buttoned the flap closed, then wiggled the lamp’s chimney back into position and lifted the lamp from the mantel by the narrow glass neck. Holding it aloft before me, like the Statue of Liberty—the Statue of Electrical Outage, actually, or the Statue of Paranoia—I made my way back to the kitchen and set the lamp on the table. The kitchen had always felt safer, somehow, or more comforting than any other room in the house, but tonight even the kitchen seemed perilous.
Leaves clawed and slapped at the windows like hands—like Garland Hamilton’s hands, slapping me in the face, again and again. Another flash split the darkness, and for a blinding moment I thought I saw a man silhouetted against the lashing rain and shuddering hedge. Then the night went black again, and the afterimage on my retina reversed to a negative: The dark figure looming against the brilliant background lingered as a ghostly shape in white on a field of black, the edges fringed by the bleached-bone fingers of tree branches. When the afterimage faded and my eyes returned to normal, all I could see was my own image reflected in the kitchen window, the oil lamp beneath and to one side of me, casting ominous shadows in the hollows of my eye sockets. I did not look like someone I’d want to meet in a dark alley.