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THE BIG FLASH

[Excerpt from the Biwa Book]

One evening a couple of weeks ago it began to snow what when I was a kid they used to call corn snow, grains of snow about the size of corn kernels, like a lot of real cold styrofoam packing material falling from up there in the dark. A palpable dryness took over then, both psychological and actual; the air was winter-drier than usual, and later when I was just falling asleep in the big hiss-whisper that surrounded the house, through the snow-pinging skylight above my bed god suddenly took a flash picture of me with my eyes closed, and I opened them but was still blinded and then lifted from bed by the loudest thunder I had ever heard, a tsunami of sound that went on and on and on, rolling down the mountain across the sky away toward the distant sea and still roiling and rumbling and crashing, from one long bolt that had shot along the sky in an instant over a distance it took sound many minutes to traverse away. Biggest lightning bolt I ever didn't see, longest loudest thunder I ever heard, but in the morning everything was normal, no big footpints around, not a sound remaining.