Madelaine

by Jo Withers

He said he had the power to harness lightning. In the early days, just after my diagnosis, it was all he talked about. He claimed the energy from one bolt would be enough to save me. Every morning, he took the contraption to the hilltop, chasing distant thunder. I was waiting to start my treatment then, wished he would sit with me, take the weight out of the minutes and hours wondering when the doctors would call, but instead he spent his days following the clouds, cumulus and stratus, cirrus and mammatus, desperate to channel the next lightning strike.

At first, I’d watch him from the chair by the window, running around like a lepidopterist fluttering up and down the local hills with his storm net. He was giddy and boyish, like the child we never had, his dark hair caught by the wind so it wisped before his eyes like the last moments of a dream. He would stay out all day, coming home late, damp with sweat and rain, smelling like sulfur as he climbed into bed.

Of course, I knew the truth. I knew he couldn’t bear to watch me weaken, that he took himself out so he didn’t have to watch me struggle, pulling every breath through my rattling bones. But at some stage he forgot that he was lying to himself, started to believe it could actually work, that he could cure me.

One day, weeks later, when we had visited oncologists and chemo wards and blood and marrow had been extracted and the pain was biting and the doctors had said in stern, apologetic tones that there was nothing anyone could do, he came running into the bedroom bouncing with excitement. He had caught his first bolt. He held it up, a small light in a jar, glowing like a specter’s aura in the dark. He brought it closer to the bed and I wondered at its shape and quickness, slippery bright like a luminous eel convulsing as it suffocated out of water.

He pulled back the bedcovers and gently bolted wires around my neck and wrists. He clipped cables to the bolts and attached them to a whirring machine at the end of the bed, then he connected the machine to the wriggling electric worm. He took a deep breath and flicked a switch and the shimmering bolt shot up the wire towards my body, crackling and hissing as it rode the length of cable.

I expected it to burn as it reached me, was looking forward to its shocking embrace after weeks of bleak inertia but I felt nothing. As the lightning hit my skin it fizzled like a damp match. I saw the excitement fall from his face, shifting to utter hopelessness. So, I pretended. With all my energy, I launched myself into a sitting position, began to jerk my body as I’d seen people do in hospital dramas, thrashing frantically as though I was being jump-started. Then I threw myself back on the bed as though I’d passed out.

The next morning when I woke he’d gone, leaving food, flowers and a note – You slept better, my love, I have gone to seek more of lightning’s healing power, eat to build your strength.

He was adept at catching bolts now, so ‘treatments’ became more regular. Every few days, he would appear with a glowing charge in his collection jar. Each time, I reached out desperately as though I couldn’t wait for him to deliver the delicious jolting energy. But each time, I felt absolutely nothing.

As he became an expert at harnessing lightning, so I began to excel in my role. When he was out, I hacked at what was left of my hair, so patches sprouted at chaotic angles as though spiked by the electric charge. With soot from the fireplace, I blackened my wrists and neck where the bolts attached and snapped off the yellow flowerheads beside the bed, crushing the petals into my skin to create a glowing jaundice.

He was delighted to see physical signs that his strange therapy was having an effect and put renewed vigour into chasing storms, but my energy waned daily, the demon inside me twisting every cell, consuming my flesh, insatiable and cruel. Before long, I couldn’t react, couldn’t keep up the pretence of the power surge, couldn’t arch my back nor lift my head above the pillow.

I stared out, unblinking and motionless from the bed. I noticed all things now, veins on leaves, sunlight patching shadows on the ceiling, ants circling on the windowsill, round and round in panic like the people in the chemo ward. And I noticed him, the sorrow in his eyes, the realisation he’d failed, the shame that he’d spent my last months bewitched by clouds.

I couldn’t offer comfort, I was floating in and out of myself by then, sometimes in the agonising cage of my body, sometimes above it looking down. As though in sympathy with our nightmarish predicament, that night the most momentous storm unleashed.

He ran from the room and returned with a pulsating jar, erupting with the energy of one thousand stars. As I watched, he attached the jar to the machine. It was senseless, I was beyond help, but I was powerless to stop him. But then, instead of placing the wires at my neck and wrists, he wound them around his own.

In seconds he was twitching, frothing at the mouth, bleeding at the ears. He lurched towards me, flashing horrifically like a human X-ray, his skeleton illuminating intermittently, framing every petrified bone. He fell against the bed, held me as I’d wanted him to for months, my barely living body in his dying arms, and as he pulled me against his convulsing chest and the last beats of our singed hearts crashed against each other, finally I felt a spark.