Side: Excerpt from Ball Lightning

Outside, lightning flashed dramatically.

This time, though, the arc came in through the wall, emerging like a spirit from an oil painting of a carnival of the Greek gods. It was about the size of a basketball, and shone with a hazy red glow. It drifted gracefully over our heads, followed by a tail that gave off a dark red light. Its flight path was erratic, and its tail described a confusingly complicated figure above us. It whistled as it floated, a deep tone pierced with a sharp high whine, calling to mind a spirit blowing a flute in some ancient wasteland.

Mom clutched fearfully to Dad with both hands, an action I have looked back on in anguish my entire life. If she had not done that, I might have one relative left alive today.

The thing continued to drift like it was looking for something. It finally found and stopped, hanging about half a meter over my father’s head. Its whistle became deeper and intermittent, like bitter laughter.

I could see inside the translucent red blaze. It seemed infinitely deep, and a cluster of blue stars streamed out of the bottomless haze, like a star field seen by a spirit rocketing across space faster than the speed of light.

Later, I learned that the internal energy density of this mass could have reached twenty thousand to thirty thousand joules per cubic centimeter, compared to just two thousand joules per cubic centimeter for TNT. But while its internal temperature might have exceeded ten thousand degrees, its surface would be cool.

My father lifted his hand, more to protect his head than to try to touch the thing. Fully extended, his arm seemed to exert an attractive force that pulled the thing toward it like a leaf’s stomata absorbs a drop of dew.

With a blinding flash and a deafening boom, the world around me exploded.

What I saw after the flash blindness lifted from my eyes would stay with me for the rest of my life. It was like someone had switched the world to grayscale mode in an image editor: instantaneously, the bodies of my mom and dad had turned black and white. Or, rather, gray and white, because the black was the result of shadows cast by lamplight playing off the creases and folds of their bodies. The color of marble. Dad’s hand was raised, and Mom clutched at his other arm with both hands. There still seemed to be life in the two pairs of eyes that stared petrified out of the faces of these two statues.

A strange odor was in the air, which I later learned was the smell of ozone.

“Dad!” I shouted. No answer.

“Mom!” I shouted again. No answer.

Approaching the two statues was the most frightening moment in my life. In the past, my terrors had mostly been in dreams. I had been able to avoid a mental breakdown in the world of my nightmares because my subconscious was still awake, shouting to my consciousness from a remote corner, “This is a dream!” Now, it took that voice shouting with all its might to keep me moving toward my parents. I reached out a trembling hand to touch my father’s body. As I made contact with the gray-and-white surface of his shoulder, it felt like I was pushing through an extremely thin and extremely brittle shell. I heard a soft cracking, like a glass crackling when it is filled with boiling water in the winter. The two statues collapsed right before my eyes in a miniature avalanche.

Two piles of white ash settled on the carpet, and that’s all that was left of them.