Fat Lightning by Howard Owen Page A

her left hand.
    A big man in a flannel shirt and work pants, his blond hair and teeth thinning in unison, sees what happens and comes up to Nancy.
    â€œHey, lady, how about me? I can sure use some of that,” he says, his smile twisting into a leer.
    Nancy doesn’t even have time to be afraid before the old woman jumps between them, her chin barely coming to the man’s chest.
    â€œWan’ me to put a spell on you?” she shouts at him. “Wan’ me to? What’s big old white trash like you here for? You get you a job!”
    The man is taken aback. All the other homeless watch in defeated silence as he backs off.
    â€œAnything to keep you from breathing on me, you old nigger,” he says, but Nancy can see that the woman has his number somehow. She glances at Nancy and goes back to where she was sitting, alone and undisturbed.
    As April dries out and becomes May, Nancy takes her lunch in the park more often, and she sees the woman every day, at the same bench, which no one else tries to take from her. She seems to have two dresses, different shades of a faded red. Her hair is steely gray and wild, never combed, and Nancy doesn’t think she could weigh more than 90 pounds. She’s lost most of her teeth. She occasionally appears to be drunk, but most of the time she contents herself with her Bible. She moves her lips when she reads, and sometimes she reads out loud, in a voice that is stronger than she is. It is the voice that stirs Nancy’s memory first, and then she sees that the eyes haven’t really changed that much.
    It’s been two months since Holly died, and Nancy’s thoughts, for the first time in years, have willingly turned to Lot and to Old Monacan, something she’d tried to block out for 20 years. But Holly was the last, and now Nancy can look at it all again.
    She drove out there, alone, went to the funeral with people she didn’t know for the most part, then went by Old Monacan, or where it used to be. They left the house when they built the fancier ones around it; somebody was using it now for an antique shop. She saw right away that the barn was gone. The best she could tell, it was underneath the deck of a three-story Colonial home that backed up to the old Chastain place. She wondered if the people who owned the house knew what they’d built over. She deduced that the sawdust pile was somewhere under what was now the foundation of a sprawling contemporary.
    She felt a stab of pain, walking through the weeds in front of the old house. She reached down to pick a jagged piece of wood out of her pantyhose, just above the ankle. It was, she saw when she held it up, fat lightning, so oily she thought she could feel its substance ooze through the pine wood. She threw it down and left.
    But ever since that February day, she’s been thinking about it, and a part of her already knows that she’s going to write about it, now that nobody is left to be embarrassed.
    And now, she thinks, this.
    One warm day, a day that made her think of the one 20 years before, when she and Sam left Richmond for Monacan, she has an idea. She goes to her closet and finds a dress that she can stand to part with, a dress of cardinal red with a black belt. She puts it in a plastic bag and carries it to work.
    At lunch, she brings her yogurt and apple to the park, along with the plastic bag. She thinks at first that the old lady isn’t there, that she’s moved on after all these weeks. But then there’s a rustle in the bushes and the woman comes into view, moving stiffly. She dismisses with a wave of her arm a black man who looks to be half her age. He looks back resentfully, but he moves on.
    Nancy finishes her lunch, then walks over and hands the bag to the old woman. She starts to push it away, but something catches her eye. The red.
    She snatches it away from Nancy and lets the bag fall to the ground as she holds up a red dress to outshine her other