Bolt From the Blue
THERE ISN’T A cloud in the sky when Andi Ellis is struck and killed by lightning.
Ten miles away, over in Barrenton, light rain falls beneath a leaden ceiling of westward drifting nimbostratus, amorphous gray sheets barely glowing from within. But in Dupont, out by the field hockey pitch where Andi stands, the heavens are clear, the late summer sun high and hot and so bright you gotta wear shades.
Andi’s blue eyes are hidden behind a fancy new pair of tortoiseshell glasses with bottle green lenses, and she’s smiling, laughing, still more than a little hungover from an impromptu birthday bar crawl the night before. She’s just turned twenty-six.
She’s making jokes, and not kindly ones, with best friend and fellow teacher Joyce Madras about another teacher, that weird new substitute hire Max Conroy, when the one-inch-wide bolt, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, superheated more than 55,000 degrees—hotter than the sun itself overhead—pierces her heart.
Joyce will say later that for a few moments, surely no more than two or three heartbeats, Audrey Ann Ellis seemed to almost shine inside out with a horrible, black light.
She burned.
Joyce herself flies back four feet, hair smoking, skin tingling, ears ringing.
Most of Andi’s clothes—a Halestorm T-shirt and khaki shorts—blast off her body, and the iPhone in her back pocket fuses into a knotted fist of plastic, silica, and ionized glass.
Those brand-new glasses splinter and snap and fly from her head, the lenses spiderwebbing. And the crystal face of her grandaddy’s old watch, the one he wore in the skies over Hanoi, cracks, and the hands turn black and stop at exactly 2:29 PM.
Tossed and tumbled like rolled dice, Andi lands several feet away, where she lies face down and very, very still until the crowd watching the W. T. Dupont High Cavaliers junior varsity girls field hockey team starts screaming and yelling and running in every direction away from the impact.
Only Max, that weird new math substitute in his first semester at Dupont, runs toward Andi.
Max allegedly knows CPR from a storied stint in the military, yet his hands are shaking as he hammers at Andi’s bare, ashy skin, where Lichtenberg figures—the branching burn pattern with feathery limbs, like a tree—radiate across her chest in ruddy lines.
He tries for two minutes and twenty-nine seconds to bring Andi back from the dead.
At last she coughs out a thick, bloody gout of ash and smoke, her heart reluctantly starting up again like an old car engine turning over, just as a Cooke County ambulance appears, rumbling across the manicured playing fields, big wheels chewing up abandoned drink cups, folding chairs, and sunglasses.
By the time it rolls to a stop next to them, Max has taken off his T-shirt to cover Andi’s naked body and is holding her trembling hand.
In the immediate aftermath of the event—that’s all anyone will ever call it—Andi can’t remember much and doesn’t want to talk about what little she does.
A black light … a black burning light like a dark, dying sun inside her heart.
She experiences all the expected symptoms, pain and dizziness, muscle weakness and seizures, a persistent ringing in her ears, so much so that when she turns the latest Halestorm album as loud as it will go, the sound still seems subdued, muffled, as if wrapped in gauze. She finds she rom the Blue
THERE ISN’T A cloud in the sky when Andi Ellis is struck and killed by lightning.
Ten miles away, over in Barrenton, light rain falls beneath a leaden ceiling of westward drifting nimbostratus, amorphous gray sheets barely glowing from within. But in Dupont, out by the field hockey pitch where Andi stands, the heavens are clear, the late summer sun high and hot and so bright you gotta wear shades.
Andi’s blue eyes are hidden behind a fancy new pair of tortoiseshell glasses with bottle green lenses, and she’s smiling, laughing, still more than a little hungover from an impromptu birthday bar crawl the night before. She’s just turned twenty-six.
She’s making jokes, and not kindly ones, with best friend and fellow teacher Joyce Madras about another teacher, that weird new substitute hire Max Conroy, when the one-inch-wide bolt, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, superheated more than 55,000 degrees—hotter than the sun itself overhead—pierces her heart.
Joyce will say later that for a few moments, surely no more than two or three heartbeats, Audrey Ann Ellis seemed to almost shine inside out with a horrible, black light.
She burned.
Joyce herself flies back four feet, hair smoking, skin tingling, ears ringing.
Most of Andi’s clothes—a Halestorm T-shirt and khaki shorts—blast off her body, and the iPhone in her back pocket fuses into a knotted fist of plastic, silica, and ionized glass.
Those brand-new glasses splinter and snap and fly from her head, the lenses spiderwebbing. And the crystal face of her grandaddy’s old watch, the one he wore in the skies over Hanoi, cracks, and the hands turn black and stop at exactly 2:29 PM.
Tossed and tumbled like rolled dice, Andi lands several feet away, where she lies face down and very, very still until the crowd watching the W. T. Dupont High Cavaliers junior varsity girls field hockey team starts screaming and yelling and running in every direction away from the impact.
Only Max, that weird new math substitute in his first semester at Dupont, runs toward Andi.
Max allegedly knows CPR from a storied stint in the military, yet his hands are shaking as he hammers at Andi’s bare, ashy skin, where Lichtenberg figures—the branching burn pattern with feathery limbs, like a tree—radiate across her chest in ruddy lines.
He tries for two minutes and twenty-nine seconds to bring Andi back from the dead.
At last she coughs out a thick, bloody gout of ash and smoke, her heart reluctantly starting up again like an old car engine turning over, just as a Cooke County ambulance appears, rumbling across the manicured playing fields, big wheels chewing up abandoned drink cups, folding chairs, and sunglasses.
By the time it rolls to a stop next to them, Max has taken off his T-shirt to cover Andi’s naked body and is holding her trembling hand.
In the immediate aftermath of the event—that’s all anyone will ever call it—Andi can’t remember much and doesn’t want to talk about what little she does.
A black light … a black burning light like a dark, dying sun inside her heart.
She experiences all the expected symptoms, pain and dizziness, muscle weakness and seizures, a persistent ringing in her ears, so much so that when she turns the latest Halestorm album as loud as it will go, the sound still seems subdued, muffled, as if wrapped in gauze. She finds she can barely sleep or even concentrate for more than a few moments at a time and even
bring Andi back from the dead.
At last she coughs out a thick, bloody gout of ash and smoke, her heart reluctantly starting up again like an old car engine turning over, just as a Cooke County ambulance appears, rumbling across the manicured playing fields, big wheels chewing up abandoned drink cups, folding chairs, and sunglasses.
By the time it rolls to a stop next to them, Max has taken off his T-shirt to cover Andi’s naked body and is holding her trembling hand.
In the immediate aftermath of the event—that’s all anyone will ever call it—Andi can’t remember much and doesn’t want to talk about what little she does.
A black light … a black burning light like a dark, dying sun inside her heart.
She experiences all the expected symptoms, pain and dizziness, muscle weakness and seizures, a persistent ringing in her ears, so much so that when she turns the latest Halestorm album as loud as it will go, the sound still seems subdued, muffled, as if wrapped in gauze. She finds she can barely sleep or even concentrate for more than a few moments at a time and even when she closes her eyes, white and black flickers spark against her shut lids, like the constant flashes of old cameras or distant heat lightning hidden by clouds.
That black light.
Her skin feels slick and shiny and taut to the touch, like it doesn’t fit her right, as if she’s borrowed it from someone or something else. And her heart feels weird too, as if out of rhythm from the world around her.
In the quiet dark and solitude of her apartment, she picks through her blackened and ruined clothes, gently touching again those melted things that used to be her iPhone and her grandaddy’s watch, perpetually stopped now at 3:32.
She often also finds herself standing naked before her bathroom mirror, tracing the burn scars radiating like lacy spiderwebs over the gentle curve of her left breast down the rest of her body. Runs hands across those alien petroglyphs, those Lichtenberg figures, the so-called lightning trees. Even days later, long after they were supposed to disappear, they still feel too hot to touch. Dozens of pinprick holes on the soles of her small feet still bleed, as well as a couple of bigger indentions, round as quarters and tender to the touch, deep enough to measure with the tip of her finger.
When she turns off the bathroom lights and stares at her bare body in the dark, she swears that she glows, those lightning trees blooming on her skin flickering with their own dark, innate light.
The open, empty sky scares her now. Forecasts calling for rain make her cry uncontrollably. She fears she’s going crazy.
She researches online about other lightning strike survivors like herself, the Lazarus syndrome, those who died yet were somehow spontaneously revived, and she re-ups a lapsed script for Luvox to steady her nerves.
But not before she starts seeing ephemeral glowing motes out of the corners of her eyes—ghosts, haunts, luminous will-’o-the-wisps—call them what you want. Constant companions she can’t avoid, tiny black lightning bolts she can’t blink away.
The immediate aftermath turns into several weeks, then six months. Andi’s father had run out when she was nine, and she’s long been estranged from her mother, making it all too easy to ignore her handful of increasingly sporadic entreaties. But soon enough, the generous gifts and
script for Luvox to steady her nerves.
But not before she starts seeing ephemeral glowing motes out of the corners of her eyes—ghosts, haunts, luminous will-’o-the-wisps—call them what you want. Constant companions she can’t avoid, tiny black lightning bolts she can’t blink away.
The immediate aftermath turns into several weeks, then six months. Andi’s father had run out when she was nine, and she’s long been estranged from her mother, making it all too easy to ignore her handful of increasingly sporadic entreaties. But soon enough, the generous gifts and concerned calls from friends and associates dwindle, even from Joyce Madras. And although the administration at W. T. Dupont is more than solicitous, insisting her position will still be there whenever she’s ready to return to the classroom, the truth is the world is moving on without Andi Ellis, and she knows it.
She knows the stories about her are already circulating, changing with each breathless retelling, branching further and further from the truth like the Lichtenberg figures on her skin. Empathy turning into pity and fascination, fact into fiction, until she’s little more than an urban legend, a myth. Until even Andi isn’t sure what to believe anymore.
The only person who persists in trying to reach out is Max Conroy, although she avoids his calls too, until late one night in a moment of exhausted weakness, even his voice is better than the ringing in her ears, the flashes of light in her eyes, the thoughts in her head. And maybe she owes him that much. He brought her back to life, after all.
He speaks only briefly about what he saw the day she was struck and died, as unwilling to revisit it as she is. But he tells her how her skin was on fire when he first touched her, leaving them both wreathed in the steam smoking off her body. How in that one moment he thought or imagined or dreamed of a tiny, liminal jolt, like a last spike of the sky coursing through her, jumping to him. How it closed some mystical circuit, somehow changed him too, merged them, his heart beating for hers. Swears to her that it granted him the strength to save her.
And he tells her how she looked so beautiful lying there on the ground, surrounded by all that fiery light. Like a burning angel falling from the sky. He claims not to be a religious person, doesn’t believe in God or any higher power, at all, but quotes her a Bible verse—
His appearance is as bright as lightning and his skin as white as snow.
Max starts calling her his lightning angel and although the two of them have almost nothing in common—don’t like the same music or movies or TV shows; have no interest in the same politics or religion or art or literature; aren’t even close to the same age—they share one undeniable bond.
He held her life in his hands.
********************
ts in her head. And maybe she owes him that much. He brought her back to life, after all.
He speaks only briefly about what he saw the day she was struck and died, as unwilling to revisit it as she is. But he tells her how her skin was on fire when he first touched her, leaving them both wreathed in the steam smoking off her body. How in that one moment he thought or imagined or dreamed of a tiny, liminal jolt, like a last spike of the sky coursing through her, jumping to him. How it closed some mystical circuit, somehow changed him too, merged them, his heart beating for hers. Swears to her that it granted him the strength to save her.
And he tells her how she looked so beautiful lying there on the ground, surrounded by all that fiery light. Like a burning angel falling from the sky. He claims not to be a religious person, doesn’t believe in God or any higher power, at all, but quotes her a Bible verse—
His appearance is as bright as lightning and his skin as white as snow.
Max starts calling her his lightning angel and although the two of them have almost nothing in common—don’t like the same music or movies or TV shows; have no interest in the same politics or religion or art or literature; aren’t even close to the same age—they share one undeniable bond.
He held her life in his hands.
Andi doesn’t return to W. T. Dupont and neither does Max.
She can’t or won’t shake the trauma of that day in September, all the lingering aftereffects, real or imagined. And Max is the one constant who doesn’t ask her or push her to, even if most days she feels less like his beautiful lightning angel and more like a lightning bug trapped in a Mason jar, her life nothing more than constant, flickering motion, although she isn’t going anywhere at all. She needs true, clinical help, but Max reminds her that what she’s experienced, what she is still experiencing, is nothing short of a miracle, a life-altering stroke of fate most people will never be able to grasp, much less appreciate.
But eventually, Andi discovers there are others out there like her too, tiny groups and communities who’ve accepted the limits of what modern medicine or science can explain, who’ve somehow come to terms with their inability to simply heal or move on.
Survivors.
And although Max is troubled by the flurry of personal emails and messages she shares online and worries about her meeting a group of strangers in person, more than a year after the event, she sells her car and dumps her apartment—Max is living with her by then—and the two of them leave Virginia in Max’s white Jeep Grand Cherokee.
And once they’re gone, much as Andi predicted, the stories about her—her and Max—take on a life of their own. They grow roots and branches, spreading like a great tree, like creeping kudzu, like more Lichtenberg figures. Allegedly, the grassy spot where she was struck stays perpetually barren, and no clock or TV ever works quite right again in her old apartment. It becomes a rite of passage for some freshman to come to school every year on Halloween dressed like the pretty, lightning-struck teacher, hair teased out in a grotesque, mad scientist display, clothes strategically torn and blackened. Rumors circulate that she and Max went all “Bonnie and Clyde,” or joined a cult out west, if not started one of their own.
That’s why it’s such a surprise to Joyce Madras when seven years later Andi calls her.
********************
The call comes out of the blue too, from a number Joyce doesn’t recognize, to a number she had gotten after Andi last lived in the area.
hough she isn’t going anywhere at all. She needs true, clinical help, but Max reminds her that what she’s experienced, what she is still experiencing, is nothing short of a miracle, a life-altering stroke of fate most people will never be able to grasp, much less appreciate.
But eventually, Andi discovers there are others out there like her too, tiny groups and communities who’ve accepted the limits of what modern medicine or science can explain, who’ve somehow come to terms with their inability to simply heal or move on.
Survivors.
And although Max is troubled by the flurry of personal emails and messages she shares online and worries about her meeting a group of strangers in person, more than a year after the event, she sells her car and dumps her apartment—Max is living with her by then—and the two of them leave Virginia in Max’s white Jeep Grand Cherokee.
And once they’re gone, much as Andi predicted, the stories about her—her and Max—take on a life of their own. They grow roots and branches, spreading like a great tree, like creeping kudzu, like more Lichtenberg figures. Allegedly, the grassy spot where she was struck stays perpetually barren, and no clock or TV ever works quite right again in her old apartment. It becomes a rite of passage for some freshman to come to school every year on Halloween dressed like the pretty, lightning-struck teacher, hair teased out in a grotesque, mad scientist display, clothes strategically torn and blackened. Rumors circulate that she and Max went all “Bonnie and Clyde,” or joined a cult out west, if not started one of their own.
That’s why it’s such a surprise to Joyce Madras when seven years later Andi calls her.
The call comes out of the blue too, from a number Joyce doesn’t recognize, to a number she had gotten after Andi last lived in the area.
But Joyce knows immediately it’s her, that it’s Andi, despite how her voice has changed, roughened, aged, over the years.
Joyce finds herself crying just to hear her old friend, who she remembers as being a vibrant young woman, fearless and fun. There was a light around Andi even then, where she could hold court in a bar and sing along with all the latest songs, a barely smoked cigarette floating in one hand and a never-empty beer in the other. Dark hair messy, makeup perfect, a smile on her lips. Andi was everyone’s favorite teacher, but more than that, she was Joyce’s best friend and hearing her again after so much time lost is bittersweet, amazing, heartbreaking.
Like hearing a ghost whisper your name.
Joyce has so many questions, a million of them, but most of all, she wants to apologize, to beg forgiveness. For not understanding, for not being more supportive or more mature, for not pushing harder to help. For not having done enough, all those years ago, whatever enough needed to be. For not being a better best friend.
Andi wants to apologize too, for the way she left, for all the things she was afraid she couldn’t explain, for fear that no one would understand or believe her anyway.
But even now, after all this time, Joyce senses there are things Andi can’t or won’t say. Maybe Andi only called to hear an old friend, to remember, so they talk about everything and nothing, mostly about the past, Andi carefully avoiding much of what’s happened to her during the intervening years, until Joyce finally asks about Max Conroy.
Andi tells Joyce she left him, that it didn’t end well—bad enough he may come around looking for her. And when Andi confesses that it was risky to them both to reach out like this but worried it might prove riskier if she didn’t, Joyce realizes Max was the main reason for this call all along. At least by calling, Andi hoped she could warn Joyce, so Joyce would know to be careful, to be alert … to keep her eyes open.
Because he will come looking, JoJo. He’s going to come looking for me, now that I’ve finally gone.
Andi tells her not to bother writing down Andi’s number, because it’ll be changed by tomorrow. But before Joyce can ask Andi what the hell all this is about, and more importantly, why the hell she should be worried about Max Conroy, the line suddenly buzzes and zips and crackles.
nt young woman, fearless and fun. There was a light around Andi even then, where she could hold court in a bar and sing along with all the latest songs, a barely smoked cigarette floating in one hand and a never-empty beer in the other. Dark hair messy, makeup perfect, a smile on her lips. Andi was everyone’s favorite teacher, but more than that, she was Joyce’s best friend and hearing her again after so much time lost is bittersweet, amazing, heartbreaking.
Like hearing a ghost whisper your name.
Joyce has so many questions, a million of them, but most of all, she wants to apologize, to beg forgiveness. For not understanding, for not being more supportive or more mature, for not pushing harder to help. For not having done enough, all those years ago, whatever enough needed to be. For not being a better best friend.
Andi wants to apologize too, for the way she left, for all the things she was afraid she couldn’t explain, for fear that no one would understand or believe her anyway.
But even now, after all this time, Joyce senses there are things Andi can’t or won’t say. Maybe Andi only called to hear an old friend, to remember, so they talk about everything and nothing, mostly about the past, Andi carefully avoiding much of what’s happened to her during the intervening years, until Joyce finally asks about Max Conroy.
Andi tells Joyce she left him, that it didn’t end well—bad enough he may come around looking for her. And when Andi confesses that it was risky to them both to reach out like this but worried it might prove riskier if she didn’t, Joyce realizes Max was the main reason for this call all along. At least by calling, Andi hoped she could warn Joyce, so Joyce would know to be careful, to be alert … to keep her eyes open.
Because he will come looking, JoJo. He’s going to come looking for me, now that I’ve finally gone.
Andi tells her not to bother writing down Andi’s number, because it’ll be changed by tomorrow. But before Joyce can ask Andi what the hell all this is about, and more importantly, why the hell she should be worried about Max Conroy, the line suddenly buzzes and zips and crackles.
Hums with static so vibrant, so loud, so violent, it almost makes Joyce drop her phone.
Oh my God, she thinks. It’s just like that day in September all over again …
… the lightning …
… the lightning …
Despite all the weird distortion, she yells out for Andi, calls out to her, begs her, but can’t hear a reply, can’t make out Andi’s last words or warnings … but does catch or imagine another voice on the line, faint, faraway, frightened.
A voice … just as panicked as Joyce.
And although Joyce Madras will never know for sure, or ever hear from Andi Ellis again, she’ll forever swear that second ghostly voice was a child calling out again, again, again—
Momma … Momma … Momma …
A little girl crying.
Until the line goes dead for good. ...
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2025 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
