The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors by Michele Young-Stone Page A

cigarette dangling from her mouth. How could this have happened? Bo’s fur sizzled in spots. His skull was split open and blood trickled over his left eye onto his nose. Becca touched his wet nose, soft and cool despite the steam rising from his burned body. Becca, struggling to breathe, lay on top of him. The heat from his fur blackened her T-shirt. She saw one of his paws twitch. She tried lifting him, to carry him inside where it was dry and he might live, but she couldn’t. He wouldn’t budge. She covered him with her body, protecting him from the new burst of rain and exploding light. Holding him, wishing he would live.
    Becca’s mother grabbed Becca from behind, sliding her hands under Becca’s arms, pulling her off the dog. Becca hung like a puppet in her mother’s arms. Her shirt was splotched with blood and smelled of burnt hair. Her mother said, “Walk. There’s nothing we can do. Walk!” Becca wouldn’t walk, and only ten feet from Bo’s burned body, her mother dropped Becca on the wet grass. She couldn’t carry her any farther.
    Becca crawled back through the rain to Bo. “Don’t die.” She knew he was gone, but she still hoped for a miracle.
    Her mother ran for the house. “Mom, I need your help! Mom!”
    Becca felt the old woman’s hand on her back. The rain beating down. The old woman’s hand so unlike the feel of the lifeless, the dead. The old woman’s hand so unlike the feel of electricity moving through arms and legs. “Come on,” Grandma Edna said. “It’s time to go inside.”
    Becca looked up, the rain striking her face. “I killed Bo.”
    “Oh, sugar,” Grandma Edna said. “You didn’t kill Bo. No one killed Bo. The Lord took him from us.”
    Becca rose from the ground. “We can’t just leave him out here.”
    “We won’t,” Grandma Edna said. “I’ll get the wheelbarrow and we’ll make sure he has a burial that befits him.”
    Becca grudgingly obeyed, sobbing as she left Bo in the grass, beneath black skies and pouring rain.
    Later that night, sitting in the bathtub, rubbing a bar of Safeguard on her knees, washing away the caked dirt and dried blood, Becca thought about Aunt Claire—trying to kill herself when life is so precious; when zap, in an instant, someone can die. She thought,
I will never be like Aunt Claire
.
    Old Man John, who lived in one of the trailers up the road, “a good colored man,” according to Grandma Edna, dug a grave for Bo. Becca chose the spot—close to the barbed wire, where Bo could look out and see the mountains. Old Man John wrapped Bo in a sheet, and Becca snuck an Oscar Mayer hot dog from the refrigerator. She gave it to Old Man John to stash inside the sheet. The four Wickle women along with Old Man John held a service early in the morning. Becca said, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, we’ll miss you,” and Mary thought,
Ashes to ashes, funk to funky, we know Major Tom’s a junkie
. Claire wondered if the love of her life, Tom, knew she had tried to commit suicide. She wondered if he’d call. Grandma Edna envied the youth all around her and thought,
Goodbye, Bo. You were a good and loyal dog. I think that’s Clayton’s favorite sheet. God rest that SOB
. Edna clutched the handkerchief her mother had given her on her wedding day. Mary decided she’d buy Becca a dog to make up for all this death, and Old Man John, who stood a few feet back because he didn’t know Bo all that well, thought about his own dog, Sadie, who was getting up there in years. He thought about one day having to dig Sadie’s grave and then dismissed those awful thoughts. Instead, he remembered that he had to replace one of his guttersthat’d gotten knocked loose in the storm. He’d start on that gutter first thing.
    Grandma Edna sat in a straight-backed chair, pulling green beans from a paper bag. “Your mom’s in the den.”
    Reaching into the bag, Becca took a seat.
    The kitchen was cool, a breeze blowing through the tiny window above the sink.