Mara Quinn, camera in hand, peers skyward from the open driver’s window. Her dashboard flickers with meteorological maps and caffeine-stained notepads. In the distance, jagged lightning dances across the horizon, illuminating the outline of a lone windmill.
"If you’re going to show me something tonight, make it worth the drive," she mutters to the storm.
Mara sets up her tripod beside the SUV, lens pointed at the churning clouds overhead. The air thrums with static, her hair prickling against her skin. She glances at her camera’s screen—images burn bright, but there’s something strange in the afterimage: the faint, shimmering outlines of faces and tangled words, as if thoughts themselves are being caught.
"That’s…impossible," she breathes, zooming in on a spectral phrase—her own worry from moments before, scrawled in light.
Each lightning strike imprints new, ghostly sentences and half-formed ideas—sometimes her own, sometimes alien and unfamiliar. She speaks aloud to test a theory, her words swept away by wind, but later, in the photo, her spoken thought flares in the background, written in pure electricity.
"Every thought—before the bolt hits, it’s like the storm is listening," she whispers, awe mixing with fear.
She recalls stories from local farmers—tales of lost memories after major storms, of secrets whispered to thunder. She wonders what the lightning wants, what it remembers, and crouches, heart pounding, daring to think a question: Who else is out there?
A lightning bolt forks nearby, illuminating the field, and for an instant, Mara sees not just words but a crowd of shadowy thought-figures gazing back.
Mara hesitates, torn between fleeing into the night or staying for one last answer. She frames the sky, focusing on a patch where the energy is thickest. She thinks, intently, of her childhood question: What does lightning remember?
The next bolt strikes, blinding and silent, and when her vision returns, the screen displays a single, crystalline sentence: “Everything you wish to forget.”
Mara sits inside her SUV, scrolling through the impossible photographs. In each, thoughts—her own and others—are etched in lightning, proof that storms have memories of their own. She starts to type her article, uncertain if anyone will believe her, but certain of one thing: she will never chase storms the same way again.
"Maybe it’s not about chasing storms, but letting them chase you," she muses, watching the morning sky for lingering sparks.
