The Prophecy
by Joanna Grisham
Lester Crosby had been struck by lightning twice. After the first time, when he was thirty-eight and working at the dam, a fortune-teller in Panama City Beach told him to expect to get struck every twenty years. It’s all part of the plan, she whispered, and when Lester was struck again at fifty-eight, he believed she was the real deal. He’d been anxiously waiting on the third jolt since his seventy-eighth birthday.
He hoped it would happen today, and part of him hoped it would take him out, if it didn’t make him famous. He preferred being famous, but he’d settle for death if it meant he didn’t have to move in with his daughter, Beth-Ann, who was headed over to take him to live with her unemployed boyfriend and blue-haired teenagers in a double-wide across town.
It had been an unusually dry April, and Lester sometimes worried the fortune teller was wrong about the three strikes. They could misread those crystal balls, couldn’t they? Still, he checked the weather forecast every morning because he wanted to be ready. This morning the goofy weatherman with the bad toupee on Channel 9 said there was a fifty-percent chance of thunderstorms, which was all Lester needed to hear. He pulled his white, plastic chair into the middle of the yard after breakfast and waited, as the clouds took shape in the distant hills.
Lester was somewhat of a local celebrity, and he liked being semi-popular, even if all it ever got him was a free beer on the anniversary of one of the lightning strikes. In middle school, kids made fun of his hand-me-down clothes and mama-cut-it hairdo. Sometimes, Lester wasn’t sure if anybody ever liked him in his whole life, but he knew they at least respected him now. You have to respect a guy who survives two lightning strikes.
Otherwise, Lester’s life had been far from extraordinary. He got married to the first girl he’d ever kissed, had two kids, one he loved and one he tolerated, and retired early so he could spend more time making lamps out of trash he scavenged from the city dump. His wife left him fifteen years ago and married a guy who tormented him in high school by shutting him up in his locker every other day. His son hadn’t spoken to him in ten years, and that was the kid he actually loved. His daughter worried the shit out of him calling every day, checking to make sure he ate lunch and kept sunscreen on his nose and took his blood pressure medicine.
Lester felt like he was in some kind of prison, though, technically, he was free to do whatever he liked. The problem was, he didn’t like to do much of anything anymore, except wait for storms. He stopped going to the domino hall on Wednesdays. He let the trash spill out into the kitchen floor. At her last visit, Beth-Ann pronounced him depressed and unfit to take care of himself and demanded he move in with her.
“Are they giving out psychology degrees down at the Walmart?” he yelled in response to her diagnosis, which made her cry and made him angrier.
Lester didn’t want to spend his final years rotting away in Beth-Ann’s trailer. With a third jolt on its way, he was a shoo-in for national recognition. He’d finally be something, someone special. Maybe he’d move out to Beverly Hills, do some reality TV. His spikey-haired granddaughter was confident he could become a meme or a GIF with the right social media marketing strategy. He didn’t know what the hell she was talking about, but he liked the idea of people staring at a little picture of him on their phones.
He was almost famous after the second lightning strike, which came two weeks after his fifty-eighth birthday. He was fishing off the wall at the lock, when he saw the sky darken and felt the hair on his arms stand up. He knew it was going to happen.
“It’s coming,” he said to no one and let out a loud woo-hoo. “It’s really coming!”
A reporter from one of the local TV stations came out to interview Lester. He was certain he was on his way to becoming a celebrity, but the same day he was struck, some crazy bastard in Smith County got arrested for hoarding three hundred cats in his house, and Lester’s pending fame was overshadowed. It’s hard to compete with cats.
“Third time’s a charm,” Lester said to Beth-Ann, when she slid out of her beat up minivan around noon.
She scrunched her face and shook her head. “Third time for what?”
Lester pointed at the clouds.
“Jesus, Daddy. You gotta death wish, you know?”
“I lived through two,” he said, looking away, not getting up. “This one will fulfill the prophecy.”
“Oh, are we calling that fortune teller a prophet now?” Beth-Ann sighed heavily. “You all packed inside? Bruce is on his way with the truck.”
“I’m fine right here.” Lester waved her off. “I don’t need to be baby-sat.”
“Daddy, please don’t make this harder than it has to be. I’m not the bad guy.”
Lester knew she was right about that part, but he couldn’t bring himself to stand up. He didn’t want it all to end with him in a borrowed room, with a strange yard outside, trees he didn’t know, birds he hadn’t heard.
“You know I’ll take good care of you, Daddy.”
Thunder rolled over the hills in the distance. Lester’s scalp tingled. The gray clouds moved over him quickly, and, then, the sky opened up. Beth-Ann ducked under the porch.
“Get your phone, Beth-Ann. Open that little camera.” His voice shook. “You’re my witness.”
“Get over here, Daddy!” she yelled, but Lester wasn’t listening. He sat in his white chair, arms outstretched, mouth open in a gaping smile, as the rain hit his face and the sky lit up all around him.
Joanna Grisham (most folx call her Joey) grew up in Tennessee, where she spent a lot of time playing with imaginary friends. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Georgia College. She was named a finalist for the 2021-2022 Very Short Fiction Contest at the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival and a finalist for the 2021 Ember Chasm Review Flash Fiction Contest. Her work has appeared in Gleam, The Emerson Review, The Write Launch, Construction Literary Magazine, and other places, and her first chapbook of poems is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. She lives in Tennessee with her wife and daughter and still spends a lot of time playing make-believe.