By Mickey Dunaway

The stories I publish here are mostly true. The story below is totally fiction. That said, it is based on many facts. I have been out in small boats on the Mobile Tidal Basin; therefore, the names of places are accurate. I have come close to being struck by lightning “out of the blue” with no hint of a storm nearby, and holding a graphite rod if one knows lightning is close is just asking the Almighty to check his aim. But the story of the story is entirely from my imagination.     Enjoy—I hope!

The boat was neither large nor small. It was seaworthy in all but the most extreme conditions as long as the outboard and the steering performed as intended. He had, as was his habit, trailered the boat by himself and launched it without difficulty. This early winter day, he was fishing the Mobile tidal basin – the waters where he learned to fish. Thankful that his navigation and depth sounder were giving him confidence in waters that were both unremarkable and totally unknown, he piloted his craft toward the mouth of a small rill where the tide was pulling water from it and, with it, the crustaceans from the forest of seagrasses on either side of the stream. Redfish, speckled trout, and flounder were found in the deeper holes formed by the water rushing from the rills over the ages. At least, that was what he hoped to find here. As he eased toward the stream, he intended to stay at least a hundred feet from the hole and cast his live shrimp suspended from the bright orange popping cork into the hole. And wait. 

When he launched his boat that morning, he noticed some gathering clouds, but clouds and Mobile were like grits and eggs. They were almost always a fact of life in this part of Alabama. However, his attention to the weather had taken a back seat to making sure that he did not run aground in the shallow estuary that was D’Olive Creek. It was not deep but deep enough for fish and fishermen. Yet it was also easy to find yourself aground if you did not pay attention. And, running aground could mean being stuck in the primordial black muck until someone found you, or you floated off on the next high tide.

As he reeled in his line to check if his shrimp was still alive, he found something had eaten the bait without his noticing. Probably, his bait had been resting on the bottom, and dexterous blue crabs had found themselves an unexpectedly easy meal. As he reached into the bait bucket with his right hand,  his seven-foot graphite rod was in his left and pointed toward the heavens, a flash of light and heat came out of the sky that found its way directly to the fishing rod in his hands. 

Knocked down by the force of the bolt, he hit his head on the rear bulkhead, leaving a deep three-inch gash on the left side of the back of his head. The last thing he remembered as he entered unconsciousness was the light and the heat from the lightning that burned his hands that gripped the rod.

The lightning came seemingly from nowhere. But came it did – even though the sun could occasionally be seen between the clouds above his boat and the congregating storm clouds were miles farther to the northwest. There had not even been thunder. The bolt knocked him to the floor of his boat. Burning his hands and feet. Rendering him in a mental state that ranged from semi-conscious delusions to comatose. Remarkably, the boat had sustained no structural damage, and so it rocked and rolled with the increasing wind-driven waves. 

As he lay on the bottom of the boat, he could not be described as lucid by any definition of the word. Still, at times, when he drifted out of his coma and into semi-consciousness, he almost thought of a face. But just as the face was coming into focus, he would drift back again into oblivion. 

Time was not a concept of which he was at all aware. He had no sense that darkness was approaching and, with it, the potential for hypothermia and shock. The fisherman knew he was thirsty. That he was hurt – maybe seriously—and most of all, as an outdoorsman, he knew he was helpless. He sometimes thought he saw the Almighty watching him – appearing as a bright supernova. At other times, he cursed as he eased back into the black nothingness of his coma.

_____

He thought he felt something cold on his lips. “Perhaps this is what the onset of hypothermia feels like,” he thought in a brief moment of lucidity before slipping back into his coma. Then he felt it again. It was the cold in his mouth again. And he seemed to be involuntarily sucking on something that felt very much like a washcloth. He was able, he thought, but was not sure – nothing was sure – that he felt a cold liquid, drop by drop, sliding down his throat. 

Time passed without his knowledge or awareness until he thought he heard a voice talking to him. With it, he hunted the depths of his brain step by step until he composed a complete picture of the voice. But he could not sustain it, and so he again lapsed into a total coma where the harmony of nothingness seemed to dwell. Soon Morpheus, called to him to just give in to the peacefulness. But something in him resisted. 

_____

On the tenth day, he blinked his eyes. Nothing more. It lasted seconds. But she saw, and she wept. The nurses and doctors reluctantly said it could be good news or mean nothing at all. “Patience,” they said, “is still the best emotion to practice right now.” She knew it was a good sign. And so, she again continued reading to him from Pat Conroy’s Prince of Tides because it was their favorite book by their favorite author. She hoped the irony of the book title might just cut through the fog of unconsciousness.

On the fifteenth day, he opened his eyes, looked directly at her, and spoke two words in a hoarse whisper, “What happened?” 

“You were struck by lightning, and you have been in and out of a coma for the last two weeks—more inthan out.”

“How did I get here?” he growled. And, as she was about to tell him, he slipped back into the coma, where he stayed for another three days. Three days to the female voice seemed an eternity of worry that his lucidity had only been a fleeting dream. But she continued to read and talk. Anything to bring him back.

On the eighteenth day, he awoke for good, and he called her by name, and they hugged and cried until the nurses separated them. Morpheus crawled back into her cave and never called his name again. But she did. “Mickey. Shug. Babe. You Little Shit.” “You scared me. Don’t you ever do that again?”

_____

On the nineteenth day, he asked about Boomer. And she knew that he would be OK. His hands and feet were healing remarkably well and required only light bandages. It would be a while before he walked without pain or held a fishing rod, but he was back.

On the twentieth day, he asked about his boat and got the “little shit” treatment again. “I am never letting you go out in a boat again, you little shit.” But he knew there would be another boat, and she knew he would be OK.

On the twenty-first day, he left the Mobile Infirmary. On the drive toward Charlotte—pulling the boat behind us— he told her he could vaguely remember someone with a Southern voice reading stories to him. “Do you know who that could have been? Or did I just dream it?”

That was me. You little shit!

“They say all marriages are made in heaven, but so are thunder and lightning.”
― Clint Eastwood