The storm torn down I94 as I tore into it, the ever-dedicated student driving in weather he'd rather not be toward a class he didn't comprehend to earn a degree that he didn't care about. The rain became a suffocation. Eyes were useless; unfortunately, cars don't have eyes, so we highway denizens sped on headlong.

My head did what heads do when blinded: toss to and fro, toss to and fro, hoping to see anything other than the glint of a scythe. Just before Deerfield Exit 250, my head fro'd right, the planet lit up not only like it had nothing better to do, but it had been planning this immolation all along.

It was a second literally split:

[hh:mm:ss.ss]

4:47:15.09: 100 feet off the highway to my right, somewhere on a small farm, a glow occurs and brightens.

4:47:15.15: The shape of the bolt becomes apparent to my eyes; a thick one, more joules than I can count, so sudden and strong a blast that the only reason I can see it .06 seconds after it strikes is because it is already fading out.

4:47:15.17: The cool black tracing of the lightning's outline -- a phantom reality, lightning has no outline -- is impressing on my retinas in the wake of the hit. The burn in my eyes is cooler toward the edges of the bolt, so I think I see outlines in cold black.

4:47:15.21: A golden glow begins to radiate from the ground. Without pause for metaphorical allegory (where the hell would I have paused?) it resembles a hand of dessicated fingers reaching to the sky. [With pause for metaphorical allegory, I realize seconds later that I think it is the oppressed, offering to either shake hands with or arm wrestle The Presence.]

4:47:15.23: It is not a hand, or fingers. It is a tree, and it has just been struck by lightning.

4:47:15.31: The black kirlian aura of the bolt folds into and over the place where the bolt had been nanoseconds before as if the fury of it were being replaced by a hewn sword, the black emptiness folded and folded, honed and folded and honed and folded and folded a thousand times into an edge designed to deliver nothing less than the decisive electric death meant for whom it touches.

4:47:15.34: The tree has evolved into a hand of fire, fingers splitting wide with the trunk. Either The Presence refused its supplication, or defeated it at the arm wrestle. Either way, the tree is toast. In full furious flower and glowing like the doomed of Horsell Common, it cracks with the punishing crescendo of the lightning displacing all that stood in it's way. The concussion is a roar of victory.

4:47:15.42: It's over. I'm swerving through blinding rain.

Everything changes you with subtlety; but some things change you utterly.

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