16

5/50: LIGHTNING

TO ATTRACT the attention of Death, you couldn’t just be afraid. It didn’t matter how deeply into your bone marrow your fear got. You had to truly believe you were going to die. It was like a beacon, that belief. A ping sent out to the Reaper that added you—even if only temporarily—to his list.

Come find me, it said. Come and take my soul.

At least, that was Esther’s theory, which could be totally wrong. It could be that your death was predetermined, and the Reaper knew the exact time and place that you would die, and didn’t bother paying any attention to you until your time came, but she couldn’t work with that.

The Sunday of 5/50 happened to coincide with the forecast for a wild weather warning in the afternoon. A thunderstorm, a remnant from the fast-dying warmth of summertime, was set to roll across the outskirts of town, and even though number forty-six wasn’t lightning (it was graveyards), Esther asked Jonah if they could swap the fears and—much to her surprise—he said yes.

She didn’t bother with this week’s ridiculous excuse. (“I’m making millinery, sorry.”) She ran out to Jonah’s moped when he arrived, climbed on the back, and gave him directions to a field directly in the radar path of the storm. She was dressed as Mary Poppins—white shirt, black skirt, red bow tie, and an umbrella. They drove out together to the flat plains of grass that surrounded the town, miles and miles and miles of nothing. Not even so much as a scraggly tree. Jonah had brought a picnic, and they ate in the afternoon sunshine, checking the weather radars on their phones again and again to make sure the thunder and lightning were still coming their way. The sun-bleached grass swayed around them, a sea of blond hair. When they got bored, they listened to “Bohemian Rhapsody” over and over again, yelling the line: Thunderbolts and lightning, very very frightening me! every time it played.

And then came the first distant growl of thunder, which made them stop and stare for the first time at the storm that had been gathering like folds of gray silk on the horizon.

“Shit,” Jonah said slowly, hitting pause on Queen. “Would you look at that.”

They sat in the swelling darkness, watching the cell roll across the plains. Out there on a horizon unencumbered by houses or mountains or trees, the edge of the storm seemed alive and hungry. It sucked and grumbled, shaking the ground beneath the duo as it came toward them like a wall.

“This is really stupid,” Jonah said. “Like, we could actually die stupid.”

“That’s the point.” Esther pulled him down into the grass next to her, because they couldn’t be standing, couldn’t even be sitting, not if they wanted to survive as the storm edged over them and started to send its electric fingers out before it, searching for somewhere to strike.

“Remind me again why I agreed to let you plan this week?”

“Because you thought I’d wimp out.”

“I’m gonna have to seriously rethink that opinion.”

The air went cool and still, as if the storm was drawing all the power from the atmosphere to feed itself. The world grew darker. Rain began to fall, no more than a mist at first, then droplets so large and fast they stung Esther’s skin.

“You’re getting wet around me again,” said Jonah.

“It’s still not funny.”

“But it is true!”

And then came the lightning. Esther had never been in the immediate vicinity of lightning before. She’d always had to count the seconds—four, five, six, seven—before the thunder to figure out how many miles away the strike was. There were no seconds between strike and thunderclap here. Brightness tore across the sky at the same time her eardrums shuddered and the ground beneath her lurched. It was so sudden, so violent, that the world seemed to blink in and out of reality for a few moments, and thunder rumbled away and away and away from them, going to warn all the people of the town that the storm was coming. But they were there, at the epicenter, at the beginning of the sound that wouldn’t hit counting children for three, four, five seconds. It started with them.

Jonah took her hand, because this really was stupid, but they couldn’t run now. They had targets painted on their souls that stretched up into the heavens, begging the lightning to funnel through them to the ground. More brightness came and she understood for the first time why lightning was called a strike. It stabbed down through the air to violently connect with the earth. Esther jammed her eyes closed. If Death was coming, she didn’t want to see him. So she and Jonah held hands tightly, and their closeness made her skin shiver with delight, and every time the lightning struck, he said some iteration of, “Holy fucking shit that one was close did you feel that my God woman you will be the literal death of me!”

The strikes grew further apart, and the thunder grew distant. The rain cleared and they didn’t die.

When the rain stopped altogether, Esther opened her eyes and sat up. They were gloriously, miraculously alive, but for a moment, a flicker, a heartbeat, she swore she saw a dark figure moving away from them through the grass across the plains. It was not Death as folklore imagined him, not a tall, gaunt skeleton in a cloak with a scythe in hand, but a small figure dressed in a dark coat and black hat.

Death as her grandfather described him. Jack Horowitz.

Esther blinked and the figure was gone, swallowed by the tall grass shivering on the horizon, but she was very nearly almost certain that she wasn’t hallucinating.

How Esther imagined it in her head: That morning, a woman who wasn’t supposed to die until May 5, 2056 forgot her office keys on the way out her front door, requiring that she reenter her house to find them, which added twenty-five seconds to her daily walk to work. Twenty-five seconds might not seem like a lot in general day-to-day life. Generally, not much can be achieved in twenty-five seconds. You can reheat a cup of coffee in the microwave. Hold a yoga pose. Listen to just under half of the instrumental opening of “Stairway to Heaven.” Small victories, accomplished again and again by people every single day without killing them.

The woman in question was not to be so lucky. In the finely tuned business of death, twenty-five seconds was the difference between arriving to work still breathing, and being buried almost four decades before your time. As it happened, this unexpected exercise of free will threw off Death’s careful calculations, and the woman was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time for a piece of metal shrapnel thrown up by an industrial lawnmower to decapitate her.

A gruesome freak accident, if ever there was one, that would have the people of the town speculating about the cruel Final Destination nature of Death for many years to come. How meticulous the Reaper must be, they’d say, to so finely tune, so perfectly time a woman’s death, so that if she had left home one second later or one second earlier, or not stopped to retie her shoelace, or not bothered to go back for her office keys, or this or that, she might still be alive. There’s much that could be said here about predestination—the reason why no house was built on the lot, how the shrapnel in question came to be hidden in the long grass, how the mowing was scheduled for the afternoon, but the maintenance worker operating it had a custody hearing then and so had shifted the work to the morning. How, if his wife hadn’t discovered the text message from his mistress revealing their two year affair, then there would be no custody hearing, and so on and so forth. Hundreds and thousands of choices and chances in one unending string leading to that very moment, when a two-foot-long piece of pipe got caught in the mower blade and sheared its way through the woman’s left temple and out the other side.

Little did humans understand that Death, too, was surprised by death sometimes.

Because of this unexpected change to his schedule, an infant due to die of SIDS was not reaped. (His parents were successfully giving him CPR by the time Death arrived; the baby would go on to live to the age of seventy-seven.) Thus Death found himself with a fifteen minute smoke break from his duties. Having given up his pack-a-day habit many years earlier, he instead decided to wander the countryside and think—about life, and death, and everything that happened in between. It was then, during this unexpected and unplanned solstice, that the Reaper happened across two teenagers laying in a field, a lighting storm going on above them. He momentarily panicked. He’d already reaped one soul just that morning who was not supposed to die, and here, again, were two more. Was this the beginning of some cataclysmic anarchy against death? How much extra paperwork would this require? Would he still be able to take his vacation to the Mediterranean if the entire circle of life went to hell?

And so the Reaper, quite powerless to intervene, did the only thing he could do: He stood in the long grass and watched them from afar, eating trail mix and hoping they wouldn’t be struck by lightning and cooked from the inside out. He watched them as the storm passed without touching them, and then he moved farther away and watched them some more as they helped each other to their feet and ran in crazed circles around the empty field, throwing their hands in the air and screaming to the high heavens about their immortality. The girl, he thought, might have seen him, but humans tended not to focus for too long on things that frightened them, and she was quickly distracted by the boy at her side.

Death recognized her, though. The shape of her eyes, the red tinge to her hair, the storm of freckles across her face and—perhaps most telling of all—an almost wolfish glint of defiance in her eyes.

Reginald Solar, over the years, had caused a considerable amount of disturbance to Death’s work and so his granddaughter was someone to be paid attention to, if only to be sure that she was not also causing shenanigans, which she clearly was.

Back to reality: Esther didn’t tell Jonah that Death had possibly been there, that he’d come to watch them. All she said, as they helped each other to their feet, both drenched and dripping, was, “It’s totally working.”