Lightning

Lightning is not a dog that barks to announce the arrival of rain but thunder could be mistaken for one or a lightning could be mistaken for a cat in its shining brightness and its suddenness of appearance from the corners of dark rooms or skies jumping unannounced leaving scratches on faces and thin red marks oozing blood a hole in the ozone layer around the sun around which revolve twenty-seven thousand planets growing peas in pods in tall green plants some say beans some say plants that have been there – eating roasted peanuts all the time earning silver and coins in gold and diamond high pressure carbon and a million, million years some say a billion years wearing full-sleeved shirts drying swinging with the pendulum of a grandfather wall clock going hickory-dickory after the mouse has climbed up it only to hurry running down when the clock strikes seventy-three times by mistake when it should have been eighty-nine instead and she waits patiently for the next sixteen strikes but silence is all she gets and she suspects her own years and worries that she has lost her ability to hear and she shakes her head vigorously as if she is trying to shake off all her bad memories and every bad thought that resides inside her head but the clock goes quiet after seventy-three and in the sullen silence that fills the room a furry cat jumps out of nowhere with the swiftness of a lightning or that of the fox that jumped, jumped and jumped up, up and up many times in vain to taste the grapes that hung high so high in the middle of the sunny vineyard