Discretionary

On Lightning
   This evening, under cloud of thunder, I opened the door to the outside with phone camera in hand in an attempt to capture lightning. The minute I opened the door, a large fuzzy tree of electricity did strike a mile or so in front of me, and I slammed the door and fell back with an utterance of "whoa!".
   This is so not in the same category as my most memorable encounter with the light beast. That was some fifteen years ago, and I was in a one-piece camouflage uniform. I had a rifle in my hand. A rifle that shot deadly pink paintballs. I was with a handful of other paint hunters when the facility crew member in residence lifted his walkie talkie and requested a vehicle to pick us up. For a few raindrops had begun to fall. And then the needle of life jumped a groove. That I wasn't blown off my feet was notable, because everything was white and deaf. When we recovered from the great white shark woodland T-bone onslaught, we looked at each other with agreement that lightning had just struck in the next game field.
   The facility impresario with the communication apparatus screamed into it for the arriving vehicle to arrive faster, which it did, and that white pickup truck did quickly become populated with now-wet color marauders. Unfastened to the bed, we bounced along in our wet deafness, and I thought then, "I was not alive for Vietnam, but my god, this is the Vietnam of recreational dangers."
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I am writing an unconventional fiction book.