Flash
- Sep 26, 2025
- 5 min read
by Jane Wageman
When lightning cut the sky on the first day of school, in a perfect nerve extending from one end of the large classroom window to the other, Nora Stevens, grade 3, grabbed a fork from the lunch box at the bottom of her seat, and stuck it into her temple.
It was August. Everything was meant to be apples and leaves and fresh starts. Everything was meant to be autumn and cool. It was a heat storm with no rain. It was 2pm, the windows cracked because the AC was broken, and the air and the kids and everything had an edge, a static.
The tines did not break the skin; they only made contact with the divot beside the ear. The metal points gave pressure as Nora pushed, seated in her chair, staring at Ms. Leopold’s back as she wrote the end-of-day procedures on the board alongside some math problems.
Nora had seen her father do this once. He had done it during a storm at their old house, the one before they moved here. He had done it with two forks, actually, standing in the kitchen. He’d been lying on the couch for a half hour, maybe more, with a damp towel over his eyes, while Nora and her brother sat at the kitchen table, coloring, but then a clap of thunder had sprung him up and launched him to the drawer, where he’d rummaged around, found the pronged utensils, and aimed them into the opposing sides of his head.
He’d stood there, eyes closed, digging them further in, leaning against the countertop.
Jesus, she heard him say, just as her mother walked through the front door. I’m going to put a drill through there.
Joseph, her mother said to him. The kids.
Nora and her brother were paused with the colored pencils in their hands, quiet, they’d been told to be quiet, and they said nothing as they stared across the kitchen at their father.
In the classroom, seated in the very back row, by the still-flashing window, the air creeping onto the nape of her neck, Nora waited for someone to see what she was doing with the fork. But the other kids were all looking at the storm and then looking at the board and then looking at the work on their desks.
Maybe she should say the part about the drill. Maybe she should stand on her chair.
With the fork still poised on her right, she reached down with her left hand into her lunch bag to grab a spoon for the other side of her head, and just as she found it and brought its cool curve to her skin, the boy beside her saw. It took a minute for him to find his voice and another for him to remember Nora’s name. Another to decide whether to raise his hand or just shout.
Teacher, he said (he had forgotten Ms. Leopold’s name), she (and Nora’s, again, by the time he decided not to bother with hand-raising) is —
But he didn’t have to finish because everyone had already turned at the sound of his voice, Ms. Leopold and all the rest of the class, and of course Nora instinctively did what anyone would do with that many eyes suddenly cast upon her: She let her arms fall from her temples to her sides, the spoon and fork now just dumb extensions of her hands.
The effect of which was: Most of the class did not observe her odd behavior at all.
She felt the flush of tears rise in her throat. There was a moment when it could have gone either way, when it was possible to have swallowed them — but she didn’t, and then there she was, first day in a new school, crying while the rest of the class watched.
Nora couldn’t have identified the specific cause of the crying — whether it was the reality of so many eyes on her, which did not feel at all like she had expected it to; whether it was a lack of words or too many; whether it was that she had been caught doing something or caught doing nothing at all.
At home, it was somehow always both. Doing nothing was always something; it was always too easy to be loud.
Daddy, look! she’d say, in her softest voice, picture in hand, and their mother would say, Not right now.
Her parents were always saying not right now and then forgetting, later.
Well, not always. They remembered, sometimes. Sometimes even after Nora forgot.
Nora would not forget this moment in the classroom, not exactly, but over time it would get distilled to a funny little beat, a blip, a note. The first day of third grade and the fork. She’d have a weird image of herself performing this action, in the back of the room, and that was it. The rest of the details would go, washing into the longer strand of memory: the year they moved to Milwaukee and her mom went back to work and her dad became the parent who stayed home. The year his headaches were the worst — why were they the worst that year? she would ask him later. They were always bad, but they’d gotten particularly bad that year, hence the changing of jobs and the move. But he didn’t know.
What do they feel like? she would ask him another time. Like a flash?
She could see the fork at the side of his head, a small rod connecting with the lightning inside. A broad flash, or that thin spine of light, both of them quick and then gone.
No, he’d say. No, not like that at all.
Like what then?
He’d shrug. But then say, It’s the kind of thing you can’t really explain after. It’s like they didn’t happen.
Okay then.
And she wouldn’t say that this sounded exactly like a streak of light, the kind that leaves a ghost of itself across the sky.
Except, of course, everything feels unending while you are in it, and this is the part that she is always forgetting too — what it felt like to be eight and sitting in the back of that classroom, waiting, before the fork, before that quick burst of decision. She had been sitting there, wanting in a way she can never quite remember these years later, though it’s a wanting that comes back to her at the oddest times. When she’s standing on the sidelines of the volleyball court in high school, knowing she’ll never get in. When she’s entering a college party and feels — before anything has happened, before they’re even halfway through the door — the way the throng will absorb her in anonymity, the way eyes will pass over her so lightly that she’ll become invisible under them. When she’s sliding into bed alongside her husband after he’s already asleep, his still back to her side of the bed. When her daughter runs past her out the door.
Her father was supposed to pick her up that day from school, but her mother came instead, the parking lot aflurry with cars and bodies under a dull grey sky. Ms. Leopold told her mother about the crying, but by then Nora had calmed down; her teacher’s words may as well have been a story that happened to someone else. She had been taken into the hallway and time had passed; the tears had been all the way back by the classroom, and now they were here by the door. It already felt so far away. It already seemed so long ago.
Jane Wageman holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University and is currently a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute in Minnesota. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Dappled Things, The Christian Century, and Lake Effect. She writes at the Substack Quick Bright Things https://janewageman.substack.com/.
