Ball Lightning

I glanced at the table and its thin layer of dust and said nothing. But when I saw them off, I could not help asking whether any of them had a key to the house. They looked at each other in surprise and said they most certainly did not. I believed them, because there had been a total of five keys, three of which still worked. When I left two years ago I took all three: one I had with me now, and two others were far away in my college dorm room.

After the neighbors left, I inspected the windows, all of them tightly sealed with no evidence of break-ins.

The remaining two keys had been carried by my parents. But on that night, they had melted. I will never forget how I’d found those two misshapen lumps of metal among my parents’ ashes. Those keys, melted and resolidified, were sitting in my dormitory a thousand kilometers away, as mementos of that fantastic energy.

I sat for a while before starting to get together the things that would be stored or taken back with me once the house was rented. I first packed my father’s watercolors, one of the few things in the room that I wanted to save. I took down the ones hanging on the walls first, then got others out of a cabinet and packed as many as I could find into a cardboard box. Then I noticed one more painting. It was still lying on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, facedown, which was why I had missed it. When I glanced at it before putting it into the box, it seized my whole attention.

It was a landscape painting of the scenery visible from the door to our home. The surrounding scenery was dull: a few gray four-story walk-ups and several rows of poplars, lifeless from the dust covering them….

As a third-rate amateur painter, my father was lazy. Rarely going out to sketch from the real world, he was content to paint the muddy scenes that surrounded him. He said that there were no flat colors, only mediocre painters. That was the sort of painter he was, but these flat scenes, which acquired another level of woodenness as interpreted through his artless brush, actually managed to capture everyday life in this dingy northern city. The painting I held in my hand was like so many already in the box, with nothing in particular to recommend it.

But I had noticed something: a water tower that was a little more brightly colored than the old buildings surrounding it, standing tall like a morning glory. Nothing special, really, because there was indeed a water tower outside. I looked out the window at the towering structure silhouetted against the lights of the city.

Except, the water tower had not been completed until after I went off to college. When I left two years ago, it had been half-finished and covered in scaffolding.

I trembled, and the painting slipped out of my hand. A breath of cold air seemed to blow through the house on this midsummer night.

I crammed the painting into the box, closed the lid tightly, and then started packing other things. I tried to focus my attention on the task at hand, but my mind was a needle suspended on a filament, and the box was a strong magnet. With effort, I could redirect the needle, but once I let up, it would swing back in that direction.

It was raining. The raindrops tapped softly against the windowpane, but the sound seemed to be coming from the box….

Finally, when I could not stand it any longer, I raced to the box, opened it, took out the painting, and carried it to the bathroom, taking care to hold it facedown. Then I took out a lighter and lit one corner. When about a third of the painting had burned up, I gave in and flipped it over. The water tower was even more lifelike than before, and seemed to poke out of the surface. I watched as it was consumed by flames, which turned strange, seductive colors as the watercolors burned. I dropped the last bit of the painting into the sink and watched it burn out, then turned on the faucet and rinsed the ashes down the drain.

When I turned off the faucet, my eyes were drawn to something on the edge of the sink that I had not noticed when I’d washed my face.

A few strands of hair. Long hair.

They were white hairs, some completely white, so they blended in with the sink, and others half-white, the black portions catching my attention. Definitely not hair that I had left behind two years before. My hair had never been that long, and I had never had any white hair at all. Carefully, I lifted up one long, half-black, half-white strand.

… pluck one, and seven will grow back…

I tossed the hair aside like it burned my hand. As the strand drifted gently downward, it left a trail: a trail made up of the fleeting images of many strands, like a momentary persistence of vision. It did not land beside the sink, but fell only partway before vanishing into thin air. I looked back at the other hairs on the sink: they, too, had vanished without a trace.