The Lightning Pot

     The boy had waited weeks for it to storm, and when the first drops tapped against the kitchen window, he grabbed his rain jacket and his mother’s best soup pot and ran outside. The salt and pepper rain came down in sheets. Thunder groaned beyond the mountains. Then he saw it—an electric fissure which lit up the woolen sky. He raced up the hill with wet socks and the soil mushing under his boots, water streaming down his face.
     Lightning flashed again in the distant westward sky as the boy reached the top of the hill. He placed the lidless pot in its center and hid behind nearby sagebrush. He sat and sat until the electricity in the air died. The rain, a mere dusting, pattered against the castiron. 
     Much later, hunched in disappointment, he stood again. He took one step forward before lightning shattered the air, striking the pot and setting the world afire. 
     He fell backwards, deafened entirely, but when his senses returned he lunged forward and quickly lidded the soup pot. “I did it!” he yelled into the dying storm. 
     The boy ran home with the pot clamped between his hands, careful not to let the lightning leak. He burst through the front door, dragging mud and water into the entryway. “Mama! I caught it!” His mother was starting dinner in the kitchen when he entered dripping and shaking. “I caught it, Mama.”
     “I’ve told you a hundred times. Take off your wet clothes before you come inside. And your boots! Now there’s mud everywhere.” 
     “Mama, you're not listening to me. I caught the lightning.” He shook the pot above his head like a trophy won.
     “Show it to me,” she said playfully, setting the boy in a chair and tugging off his boots.
     “I can’t. The lightning will get out.”
     “How do I know you caught the lightning if I can’t see it?”
     The boy thought about this for a moment. “Right now the pot is special because there’s lightning in it. And I’m the one who caught it so that makes me special too. But if I take off the lid and show you then it will just be a pot again and I’ll just be a boy without any lightning. I know you can’t see it, Mama, but I know it's in there.”
     His mother smiled and kissed his cheek. She then reached into her dress, pulled out a few dollars, and gave them to her son. “Well, I can’t very well make soup if there’s lightning in my pot. You’ll have to go get me a new one.”
     He hugged her and quickly dressed again before heading back into the gray. His mother took that pot and put it high up on the cupboards where the lid would stay shut and the lightning would stay caught. A safe place. So her son would always know that he was special.