(A monologue for a young female)

MEG

The first time I saw one of Daddy’s photographs outside of his studio was when I went over to Mary Louise Delmonico’s house. It was in her mother’s living room. Inside its chrome frame and three-inch matte I recognized it right away, of course, the single bolt of lightning forking into three fingers, pure white on a cobalt field with flecks of orange at the edges. And the story just fell out of me. “My daddy took that. In fact as I look closely at it, Mary Louise, why yes, that’s one that was on the roll he was shooting the night he was struck and killed.”

Daddy was a lightning farmer, see. He’d go out and plant these big long poles in his buddies’ fields and wait with his camera on moist muggy evenings for the updrafts that would send dusty particles skyward, rubbing against each other in the clouds, rising up, cooling and falling, rising again, getting moist, rubbing, storing up a charge … until there was nothing left to do but explode, to send their jagged streaks of light tumbling down to the Earth, splitting the sky and landing on one of his poles, where his camera would be going a mile a minute, hoping to capture the moment when the light lay on top of the cushion of clouds, turning them irresistible shades of blue and purple and orange that only existed in his photographs.

When the story got back to Mama she didn’t scold me. She said she wished she’d thought of it herself. She said that way we could get a lot more money for Daddy’s photos from now on, but I suspect what she really meant was that it was much nicer to think of Daddy dying in a flash, doing what he liked to do, instead of remembering the last weeks in bed with the lung cancer.

I think Mama particularly hated Daddy’s lung cancer because it hit her square in the eyes that she never knew he smoked. He smoked away from home, always when he waited in the fields for the lightning to strike. She swore she never noticed—you smell what you want to smell, I guess—until she came home one day a month before he died and found him with a Winston in his mouth. “Just pushin’ the envelope, Peggy,” he told her.

When it got real bad Daddy didn’t want me to see him. Mama said how could he not take advantage of the time that was left, but I understood. I used to peek in when he was asleep, which was most of the time at the end. They’d brought in all sorts of equipment and supplies and nurses “to make him more comfortable” Mama had said, but that wasn’t Daddy’s idea of comfort, I wanted to tell her. No, Daddy didn’t want me in there so I didn’t want to be there, and I think it was then that I first thought up the story.

“Please, Mary Louise, don’t ever tell anyone you’ve got a picture from the storm that killed my daddy!” Which of course meant that pretty soon the word all over school was that Mary Louise Delmonico had a picture of the actual lightning strike that killed Meg Daniel’s old man. Boys I’d never seen would come up to me ... “Did your daddy really get struck by lightning?” The girls were too shy to ask, but when a boy I’d just told would run over to some girls and tell them, I’d see those girls’ eyes get real big and their hands cover their mouths and then they’d look at me and look away real fast. And then the next time they’d pass me in the hall they’d say, “Hey, Meg” —and they wanted to know me. See, everybody knows somebody whose daddy died of cancer, but hardly anybody knows anybody else whose daddy was struck and killed by lightning, lightning that he farmed himself. It was too good a story not to tell.