Thunder

Thunder.

My heart was racing, and I felt like an animal. Like a cowering creature, beneath the worn green blanket, frightened by the flash of light and the sky exploding above my head. I had a rabbit heart, beating a mile a minute. My eyes could not see in the dark cold room and I was drawn by some primal instinct to look towards the window once again. Boom. The sky split open, torrents of rain and a sound that seemed larger than life itself pouring out. I could feel my rabbit heart in my throat, jumping, hopping up and down, threatening to leap out and scurry under the bed. The lightening was a spider dropping down and coating everything in its web of light, trapping my rabbit heart and eating it alive. I had never before been afraid of thunder, never before felt my rabbit heart so alive and beating and pounding against my ribcage and howling to get loose. But I had also never been thrown from sleep by a falling sky. I tried to calm my rabbit heart, soothed it by turning over away from the window glowing with the angry white light and vibrating with the echo of the storm. I buried my fear in some dark muddy place inside me and sometime later, in the midst of the storm, my rabbit heart and I fell asleep again.