On the first evening after the lightning season, there was the Warling.

Great bleached voltage sat in her hands on the evening that would bite through all of history. Zeetje would bring the very first complete rendition of this majestic event into the world. Along with Pipaluk and Husk of course. You couldn't film a hubbub of music and talking and laughing slapping louder than waves all on your own. She had her cousin Pipaluk with her as director, she had her friend Husk with his camera. Zeetje would control the lightning, because merely striking the bolts down wasn't the end of the ride. You couldn't just leave your eyes off all that silver starmatter spinning out of the sky once you had released it. Besides, she wanted to keep feeling the lightning, not just see it.

They arrived at the big square, waved at aunts and postmen, zigzagged through the crowd. Hopefully they had smiled enough so that it looked like they were on their way to get iced fruit and dizter, the special Warling drink that everyone raved their heads off for. But they couldn't get distracted. Not by the strings of woven flowers in wine red, home-dyed patina and alabaster milk. Not by the penumbrae chalked on the ground, the golden rings of eclipse steaming off floral scents all night round. Not the red roofs of the surrounding houses glinting like rosehip jam in the moonlight. And not the people with their most intricate bracelet designs displayed in mazes on their arms. All that they would capture on film, with a camera that actually was Husk's mother's. They hadn't asked her. Not because she was very strict. But because it was forbidden by law, by lightning and by word.

In the entire line of time, the Warling had never existed as a thing on its own other than in mouths. People spoke of it like they did of the first rains after a drought. But seeing it, that could only ever be a thing you experienced first hand. Before explorers had stumbled upon a leaden box containing very old books like The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain, and the first camera they had ever beheld in their lives, this had been largely no issue. Any attempt at a written account of the Warling was futile and harmless. No one believed that written words could ever capture an event of such scale through ink and dead wood. However, once said explorers had figured out how to utilise a camera and develop the film, all hell broke loose. Suddenly, the Warling was not an unending night with shadows dancing on scrims and music notes hiding in bushes and treetops far beyond the perimetres of the square, but it was a rectangle. Stuck in a nothing-saying image or awkwardly hung between the walls of a moving picture. Paintings and drawings and any other art were different, those images could never entirely cut anything out of the Warling and display it as reality, those were just ignored as pretty colours and shapes. But this new curse? Zero tolerance policy.

The reason why Zeetje, Pipaluk and Husk were allowed with a camera on the Warling square was simple. Carrying one wasn't a crime, but no one dared to use one inside of the Warling, the repercussions were far too great. They could track the chemicals inside of the camera the very second that a picture was being taken, and then you were in for it. You couldn't get away from a mob of people all ingrained from birth or from the Photo Stop Movement which restricted all camera-possessors from ever photographing or filming the Warling. Confiscated pictures were burned, photographers were locked up and some never seen again, and if anyone had ever succeeded at keeping hold of a picture or a film of the Warling in the past years, chances were very great their community had shunned them or that someone had ratted them out to authorities. 

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But before that, Husk, Pipaluk and Zeetje, all bored, were prawling a field the very first day of the lightning season, and when sharp angles started electrifying the sky, when Pipaluk froze in fear, but Zeetje felt something in the air right before which made her muscles jolt on fire and cry a zoetrope of thought through her bones:

"All this is, is only time."

At that moment, she grabbed the lightning out of the sky so that it sat in her hands instead of burned through her cousin. Her bones must have splintered, she had never been this ebullient. Her friends were shrieking at her, but she heard them as if they were echoing off the stars.

"What are you doing? Throw that out! Throw that out!" Husk yelled. His eyes were shaking like water balloons. 

"Come on, touch the ground or something— I don't know!" Pipaluk screamed. She sounded more horrified than if she herself had gotten fried.

"Calm down, I only feel like a god," Zeetje said. She was calm, too. She had never been more clear-headed and loved by nature than now.

But Zeetje couldn't talk to her friends like normal, her ears were ringing with something all above them. And because she liked talking to her friends, she started shaking her hands with the lightning in them.

"Wait, first watch—" Husk attempted to warn her, but Zeetje had a feeling that she would do no harm if she felt like she wouldn't want to do any harm.

The lightning crusaded through her fingers till it reached her very tips, then jumped off in individual sparks and grew into beautiful streams of liquid electricity. Shots hit, hits shot through the grass, the headless tree stumps here and there, and reverberated underneath their soles. But nothing touched them except for a sharp metallic stinging in their noses. Sound travelling more slowly than light, and there not being any thunder clouds to headslam boulders against each other, all was silent. The three stayed that way for a while.

"Dead luck! I wish we had filmed that, no one will ever believe us," Pipaluk broke the quiet.

"It would never have looked as great as it really was," Zeetje pondered. The half-thunderstorm leaving her body made her feel like she had met a second lifetime. She knew she couldn't go the rest of her life without ever experiencing that again.

"We would certainly become the most famous photographers in the world, though. Can you imagine, summoning lightning at will to get the perfect shot?" Husk said. His mother was a prize-winning photographer, staying very far away from the Warling with her camera of course.

"No, a shot of this lightning alone wouldn't accomplish or mean anything. Listen, it felt like the whole universe was shaking my hands, it felt like I'd be loved forever. If we want to capture this lightning, we have to capture the greatest thing in our world along with it," Zeetje said.

"But how do we find something like that?" Husk asked.

Pipaluk scratched her arm, one of her bracelets tore apart.

"Dead luck, I just finished my bracelet pattern for the Warling. I know it's only in a couple of months but still— I was so excited! It survived lightning, why not my nails?"

"Right!" Husk exclaimed with a pointed look at them both. 

"What?" Zeetje asked.

"The Warling."

All three grinned.

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So now that the end of thunder season had marked the Warling on the colour bursting square, the only way of forging photography history laid at their hands. The moment they started filming, Zeetje would rain lightning down. The whole thunder season she had practised at holding onto lightning longer and longer, and none of her friends had ever gotten hurt. On top of that, Zeetje could now carry lightning to wherever she liked. No one would catch the chemicals of their camera with all that electricity in the air, and hopefully no one would notice Husk running to catch each starry bit of atmosphere there was of the Warling. Zeetje would show the lightning how honourable its presence felt to her, Husk would make his photographer-mother prouder than the highest flame. And Pipaluk would get revenge on the bolts almost striking her down by keeping them nicely locked up on film.

And when Zeetje parted the sea for some empty space in the middle of the square, when Husk was ready to pull out his camera at a blink, and when Pipaluk would dive at anyone who tried to stop her two friends, they were ready to snap the Warling out of history.

They looked at all the faces around them, smiling in hues of the lightning finally being over, in shades of the night that held them like it only could then.

Zeetje called to her silver star bolts, Husk started filming, Pipaluk blew a kiss to the camera and all hell broke loose.

word count: 1486

newly published book mentioned: The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain by Kazuo Ishiguro

picture credit: Mark Jinks Photography