catalyst: chapter 2
lightning
“That one is like a window,” she mumbled to herself.
The sky felt blue. Not just looked blue with whispers of white clouds painted across it, but it felt blue in its spirit, its essence. Jo had been looking up far longer than she should, and as the shoreline started to creep closer to where she sat, Jo was startled back into herself as fresh foam flowed between her toes. The sand had grown darker, and the water would soon swallow her place on the beach, a hungry tide come to feed.
“Where is the cat?”
Jo turned. Lost in the music of the sky, she felt returned to a space she didn’t quite understand, to a language that confused her.
“…uhm. The cat?”
“Yes, the cat. The toy cat we brought with us. The one he’ll cry about if it’s missing. Jo, focus, I really don’t want him crying the entire ride home.”
Her son. She had a son, and he had a cat, and if they didn’t find the cat, then the ride home would be terrible. Home would be terrible.
“It’s somewhere under the, uh, towel, I think. I think or maybe it might be…”
“It’s in the water. Goddammit.”
He walked towards the waves and retrieved the soaked cat, trying to wring it out as he marched back to shore.
“Maybe we can leave it out in the sun to dry for a minute before we head back.”
“Look at the clouds, Jo. I want to get on the road before any rain hits. That fucking highway turns into a parking lot the minute there’s any weather. Isn’t that what you were staring at for so long?”
“Hm, no. I didn’t even notice out there. Sorry, I didn’t see what was going on with the toy and the tide coming in.”
“Good thing I was cleaning up Hen.”
Henry. Covered in strawberries and throwing a fit. Tom had taken him to clean up, but Jo could hear the judgment in his voice.
“I would have been watching if Henry was here. I just got lost for a moment.”
Tom had been becoming harsher about Jo and Henry, little insinuations here and there. Her watchfulness, her care, the way she looked at him, past him. She’d also been looking past Tom since their son was born, and it wasn’t for lack of attention or any disdain, she just felt the space around him called so much more. As if his presence in one moment gave greater weight to his absence from others. His mother hadn’t helped the situation, her overbearing power smothering the family and pushing Jo further and further away. Valia had been incessant in her presence ever since Henry was born. She understood that he was the first grandchild, but there was something in her mother-in-law’s eye Jo couldn’t place.
“I’m gonna go load him in the car. Can you just do a look around for anything else that might have drifted away while you were gone?”
She gave Tom a passive aggressive thumbs up, doing double duty as a “you got it” and silent “fuck you.” In the shadow of his mother, Jo had begun to hate Tom and all the things she saw of Valia in him. The two walked away from her, and she turned back towards the skyline, tracing the whispered clouds back to the storm rolling in from the ‘south’? She could never tell directions at this fucking beach, the sun too high in the sky still to check for the west. In the distance, a man sat with his daughter on the wet sand, the waves barely licking their feet. His face felt familiar, but a crack of lightning in the distance pulled her back.
She wanted to be those clouds, being pulled into their many parts, dancing in the big blue. The storm was too confronting, not her style; she wasn’t a thunderhead. She wanted cool sea breezes to spread her across the sky, so thin she wasn’t perceptible anymore, and before she disappeared, the last of her would catch the eye of someone else, inspire them to dance, to dream of a thing beyond their concept of what they could be.
Infectious almost. A chain reaction. A catalyst.
The voice broke the spell the sky had again cast on her. She stared blankly up at the nothingness surrounding her. Not a person, just sand and waves crashing, the water washing over her feet. Jo turned over both shoulders, a panicked dance of searching, but she was alone on the beach, the vaguely man and his daughter having vanished into the horizon. Whatever she thought she had heard must have been just that, a thought. She turned back to the clouds, but they had gone, evaporated into the heat of the day baking fury into the thunderstorm on the way.
Infectious.
The voice again. This time with the feeling of two boney hands clasped on her shoulders.
She turned, again nothing besides an empty beach and foamy splash at her feet. Sweat hung on her, sickly humid and suffocating. Her chest felt weighed down by the shirt sticking to it. The unshakeable feeling of hands on her despite her quick turning around.
Almost.
This time behind her, a voice similar to the first but mocking in its inflection. She searched its source, but again, found nothing. Jo sat back down. The voices were making her dizzy, nauseated, panicked. The sweat now her own waves crashing, her own foam accumulating on the shoreline. She was trying to take deep breaths, to calm herself in the sky, looking for dancing clouds and thunderstorms, for lightning or some other proof she could latch onto to come back to reality.
Chain reaction, it called behind her, but Jo didn’t bother turning. There would just be nothing again. Her breath was starting to waiver, to feel choppy and pointed, like she was tumbling stones in her lungs, and they were intermittently blocking the airway.
Catalyst, the other voice said. This time from in front of her. From the energy of the sky. From the blue where it met the water and drifted to shore. Ebb and flow with a voice.
Jo cleared her throat to catch her breath. A little cough of undoing.
A red firefly danced in front of her, sputum floating gently to the ground, touching the sand, and spreading out like red lightning, a dendrite reaching to connect another of its kind.
A second and third followed.
Infectious.
Jo coughed again.
More fireflies danced in the air, the scarlet glow raining over the backdrop of the coming thunderstorm.
“Where are Tom and Henry,” she thought.
Chain reaction, was the reply, coupled with a wicked laugh, the voice of a woman coagulating through the bursts of joy.
Her coughing continued, became more ragged and halting. With every exhale she saw more and more of the fireflies falling around her, the sand looking like a complicated network of neurons under a microscope. She thought she could even trace the electric surges pulsing through it, capturing each new blot of red and claiming it for the circuit that was growing. She couldn’t stay there, frozen on the shore anymore. She needed to get to Tom and to Henry. She needed her connections to feel safe again, to stabilize her breathing. The coughing was overwhelming her, choking her, turning her as red as the swarm of fireflies that followed her towards the car. The trail of breadcrumbs they were leaving in the sand traced her origin, where it started, told a story of their becoming her undoing.
Catalyst.
She turned, catching her breath, and the air felt still, the water flat, and the fireflies chasing her all disappeared. The sight of the red carpet of her struggle from the beach collapsed her. Sinking to her knees, a delicate snowflake of red landed on the hand perched on her knee. A final cough.
There was an eruption from deep inside her, overflowing from her mouth and nose, her eyes bursting with the swarm escaping her. The cough threw her head back and twisted her spine, and as she screamed forth a new iteration of herself, the sand pulsed with new life, new blood raining down onto it. The fireflies orbited Jo’s head like moons chasing after Jupiter’s storm, and even as she fell, they maintained their perfect positions.
Her hands caught the brunt of her fall. The bones of her wrists and arms crumbling beneath her, her head slamming to the sand, her skull caving in, and a new flock was birthed from the opening. Her body was just the hive now, the place that the scarlet cloud came from, and as Jo curled into herself with the last bit of strength she had, she saw the beautiful nebula of herself floating in the air before it crashed into the beach. The last fires of electric current from her brain lit up the network of tendrils through the sand, the raw color of it like glass dancing away from her in fractals.
Before the tide could wash it away, a lone photographer ambling down the beach for shots of the storm captured the blood-colored portrait in the sand. It looked shattered, but the image of a sad woman looked off into the distance. Clouds smeared in broad strokes behind her. A clap of thunder began the drizzle that chipped away the discernible features of the woman.
The waves swallowed the rest.