Darkness spilled out of the sky and splashed into the wide back yard where it puddled around the hot tub. Jack turned his face to the clouds and gloried in the sensations of the cold rain on his face, trickling into his dark beard, and the hot water bubbling around his naked body. He opened his hazel eyes and saw no more than a faint suggestion of blue along the western horizon where the sun had run to hide itself from the approaching storm.

His body spanned the six-foot soft-side tub with his broad shoulders pressed against one side and his feet braced against the other. He listened to the advancing thunder with some trepidation, thinking of  the relationship of lightning to water, then returned to his enjoyment of the raindrops and bubbling cauldron. The wind gusted and he heard the creak of the chair that waited next to the tub.

Don’t sweat the small stuff, he thought to himself. Take life as it comes. What you sow you shall reap. “Hmmm, that’s more to the point,” he growled deeply in his chest. Jack had whistled in the wind and he might be about to reap the whirlwind. The thunder grumbled again to the east. Closer. He saw the first flash over the roof of the house that blocked his view of the storm marching toward him.

Jack took a deep breath and seemed to settle a little deeper in the water as he exhaled. He thought about Liana’s fiery hair and buttery smooth ivory skin. Closing his eyes, he breathed deeply again and imagined her scent filling him, caressing him as her fingers had done earlier. Just before Liana’s brothers had burst into the room and torn him from her.

The storm was still on the horizon when they tied him up. The sun flew all of its red and orange flags of surrender as they bounced him in their truck to his home up the road. It was in full retreat by the time they stripped him and placed him in his hot tub. The brothers laughed as they left him there to the mercy of the gods, as they said. Paralyzed, he watched the thunderheads scrub the sun’s memory from the sky.

The mercy of the gods, he thought. In the absolute stillness behind the wind and the rain, he felt the breathless expectation of approaching destiny. He felt, also, the balm of his solitude and the release from the anxiety and longings of this world. The raindrops on his face grew and plopped with fat delight into the churning water. A sharp crackle of lightning flashed overhead, and the hair on his face seemed to stand up. He closed his eyes and gave himself up to the gods, and the lightning speared down out of the sky and impaled, instead, his wheelchair.