A Bolt of Lightning


A long time ago humans thought of me as the weapon of Zeus, the god of the sky. In humanity’s earliest days I was apparently tamed by this omnipotent being; he controlled me and thus humans worshipped him in fear he would smite them down. In our modern era, humans know better. They realize that Zeus is just a fictitious character made up to explain natural phenomena. But I am real. I am light, unbound energy. I am hotter than the surface of the sun. When humans worshipped gods, they worshipped me: lightning.

Like all great things I had a humble beginning; I started out as a puddle. A small pool of water formed by a slight slant in the ground and a little rain. As I lay on the ground soaking into the dirt, some of my molecules became hotter than the rest. Those select few rose into the air as steam. My body was ripped in two and the cooler molecules stayed behind to remain a puddle for a little while longer. I floated higher and higher; each time I passed through a cloud I would slow down more and more.
When the steam of my body had traveled five miles into the air, parts of me started to freeze. My fragmented body remained strewn throughout the cloud. Some pieces of ice were the size of fists, suspended by a rising column of air. When I looked down I saw little particles of frost flying towards me. As each piece bounced off chunks of ice it knocked off a small number of electrons. Those electrons sank to the bottom of the cloud and the pressure of evaporation pushed the smaller shards of ice upwards. With the electrons gathering at the lower portion of the cloud and the rest of the ice rising to the top, an anvil shaped cloud was formed. From far away it would look like two truncated cones stacked on top of each other, but at a microscopic level you could see that the bottom of the cloud held a negative charge, whereas the top maintained a positive charge. The combination of charge separation, freezing, and friction helped create my electrical field.
This field was so strong that it made earth’s atoms acquire a positive charge. Naturally all my energy wanted to surge into the ground, wanting to complete its atomic structure. All I needed was a way for the bottom of my cloud to touch an object on Earth’s surface. Thankfully my electrical field provided a conductive path between the Earth and itself. It locked in on a tree and I anticipated the release, ready to be set free, unchained from the shackles of my own mortality.
Striking down from the sky my electricity pooled in one place then another forming a zigzag pattern. My half-inch-thick body split in two about one mile through its trip. The rest of the electricity shot into a tree and coursed through its sap. My raw energy was too much for the tree to contain, so it exploded sending jagged slivers of wooden shrapnel in all directions. A fire started from where the stump lay, half charred and half ablaze. All my life had been leading up to this moment. All for half a second of sheer beauty; one of nature’s most amazing natural occurrences! I let out a bellow of joy, resounding across the landscape.