But it’s not black, it’s as if the most delicate of tip of giant fingernail has lifted it ground to sky like a child picking bark off a stick. Stripped as if the giant child has taken one long run at it and is pleased with how it forked. Or like the slap of a snake tongue imprinted. Or a toasting prong waiting for dumplings around a family campfire. But it wasn’t these things it was an explosion in the night, Andy says I gripped his hand, I don’t remember but in the morning when I walked the drive in a hurry to feed the cat who won’t come in anymore for fear of her sisters who beat her, the road was scattered with giant pieces of tree - see the strip hanging that never made it to the ground, that must have flown in explosion as the other pieces flew but this got caught and it hangs, testament to something sudden. Yesterday morning I didn’t see this rip up the trunk like a child banging its stick on a walk. I only saw the road scattered with great hunks of bark. My head was filled with other things. I had my eyes on my feet and my day and how I had to get a move on. But that night there’d been thunder and there’d been lightning and a storm across the valley that we look upon, high up in our forest, our house hugged by woodland. A shattering in the night that Andy said felt right over our heads and turned out was a hit, direct and lengthways upon this oak who waves at me as I come home each day and night and afternoon. It will dampen, turn musty brown and green, this surface wound that looks so simple yet the hunks that fell on the pot-holed drive were huge and messy and broken. And yesterday a funeral. I stopped on the last bit of road to look how I couldn’t look before at the strip torn off in sudden lightning strike, a lit moment that changed everything.
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Wow
100 million volts sliced through that oak and yet it's still there 💀