FICTION: THE LIGHTNING PEOPLE PLAY BY TIM CUMMINGS

The Lightning People

My little brother Baxter sees things he calls ‘the lightning people’, but he will not tell me who or what they are. It’s driving me up a rat pole. I don’t even know what a rat pole is. I think I saw it in a dream, or maybe one of Bax’s video games? But, it sounds like something that I, Kirby Daniel Renton the 1st, would be driven up.

About a month ago, Pop abandoned us and disappeared.

Dad asks me not to say that. “It’s not true,” he says. “We’ve separated for now, and he’s in Texas with Granbuela, and that’s all there is to it.”

Yeah, but still, I tell him.

“Don’t ‘but still’ me,” he says. “There is no ‘but still’.” Yeah, but still.

After Pop abandoned us and disappeared, Bax started having seizures, usually in the middle of the night. The darkest part of the night, that’s when they happen, that’s when he sees things. Monsters, or aliens, or people, or witches—I don’t know exactly—who slink down from the lightning in a dark purple sky full of puffed-up clouds.

He says they show him things.

“What things?” I ask him, and get all fidgety, probably from nerves. “Tell me.”

But he refuses. “They’re not yours,” he says. “They’re mine.” He wants to keep them to himself. He’ll be eleven in a few months. He one-ups everything constantly. The other morning, I got more marshmallows than him in my bowl of Lucky Charms. He tossed his spoon across the kitchen island and stormed off.

I want to know about the lightning people because I kinda have this thing with my brains. Dad calls it my ‘magic’, but I’ve heard others, like my teachers, say it might be ‘mild OCD’, or ‘symmetry OCD. OCD is obsessive compulsive disorder, a lot of ‘s’ sounds, like a snake is about to uncoil and bite you in the face and suck out your face juices. But, it actually means you like to be orderly. Or at least that’s what it means for me. For some people, in severe cases, it’s pretty high-key, as in buying 250 toothbrushes and throwing them out after using them for a milli-second because germs get on them so they can’t use them anymore. A milli-second. We saw the doctor about this, years ago. But, I am not diagnosed. He told us that if it was not impeding on my day-to-day life in a negative way, then not to worry. It could be OCD, or something else, or a million other things. Or it could just be me.

I organize stuff. Not just books and boxes and junk drawers. It includes people, and feelings, too. I see people’s feelings, as if they were colors, and I want to organize them. Feelings look like colored pencils that need to be put next to each other in the right way in the colored pencil box. When I see colors, I move them around. No one really knows about this stuff. No, I mean, my best friends Rockford and Ellie know, but they’re all, “Whatevz, we love you.” And Thaddeus Krasinski—he heads up YOUTHEATRE, our theatre club at Weirville Junior High. And yes, we call it ‘youth eater’ all the time. (‘Theatre’ is the act itself while ‘theater’ is the space where it happens. Krasinski is particular about that ‘re’ versus

‘er’ thing.) He knows about my brains ‘cause I told him after I rearranged the plays and books on the shelves in his office. Beige Blue Green Orange Purple Red White Yellow. Alphabetical by color. Colorbetical.

I need to know the lightning people are not going to hurt my brother, but it’s hard to figure out ‘cause I can’t go up inside his brains while he’s having a seizure. Doctor-of-Brains (the Neurologist dude) told us that the electrical pathways in the brain get mixed up for epileptics—that’s the condition that causes seizures. Epilepsy. Bax was placed inside a monster X-ray machine that looked like a giant robot butthole so Doctor-of-Brains could figure out what was going on. He said Bax was an anomaly for being able to remember anything that happened during a seizure. He said that was not normal at all. Usually, people go unconscious. All I wanted to know, and all I kept asking, was, Why? How could this all just happen? What is it? Where did it come from? Why did it pick Bax? Stuff doesn’t just happen. But the doctor said, “Well, yeah, actually, it does.”

So, I told Dad my theory: that it’s his fault Pop left. Hear me out: Pop is Bax’s favorite person in the whole world, and the fact he could leave us—leave Bax—is what made his brains explode inside his head and that’s what’s causing the seizures. After I told Dad this very wise theory of mine, that it was all his fault, he grounded me for the summer. Okay, a few weeks, maybe three, but it felt like the entire summer, ‘cause during summer, when you’re free, every day’s a huge day. To have twenty-one of them robbed from you—for telling the truth—it may as well have been all seventy-five. Drove me up the rat pole, I swear.

And now Bax is changing. I see it. He’s growing younger.

Bax has always been the smartest kid in any class. He likes to dress like a professor. Dad and Pop would buy him suits and nice shoes to wear to school. He doesn’t like to look like other kids. He likes to look like Charles Xavier from X-Men. Always put together. Even though he’s a little maniac and plays football and freeze-tag during recess. In the suits. We are used to this, how dirty he is when he comes home, so we don’t worry. Other people think he’s lit: the nice ties and big expressive eyes and shock of hair combed nicely with pomade. But, ever since Pop abandoned us and disappeared, and Bax’s seizures started, he now wants to look like a stick of Fruit Stripe gum. He wears T-shirts with colored stripes on them, bright sneakers, and his hair is a mess. He looks…normal. But, if this is normal, it’s the weirdest normal ever. And the real question, anyway, is: How do I get him to tell me about the lightning people? I need to know who they are and what they want.

Here’s the thing: I won’t let anything bad happen to Bax.

~

Tim Cummings is the author of best-selling coming-of-age novel Alice the Cat published by Fitzroy Books/Regal House. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles and a BFA from NYU/Tisch School of the Arts. Recent publications of short fiction, essays, and poetry include F(r)iction, Scare Street, Lunch Ticket, MeowMeow PowPow, From Whispers to Roars, Drunk Monkeys, Hare’s Paw, Lit Angels, and Critical Read/RAFT, for which he won the ‘Origins’ contest for his essay, “You Have Changed Me Forever.” His follow-up novel The Lightning People Play is out now from Black Rose Writing, available online and at an independent bookstore near you! Want to read more? A full excerpt of The Lightning People Play is published in EXCERPT Magazine - No 3, or you can purchase a copy of the novel here from Black Rose Writing.