When the man woke up from his lurid dream, he fled outside into a storm, swallowed a bolt of lightning, and was cut in two. One half went back home to bed, to his sleeping wife, got up the next morning, and went to work. A jagged scar ran across his chest. Proof he hadn’t been dreaming. His other half took off with a band of Roma in their painted wagons. He left them to live off locusts and wild honey in the wilderness. He spent his days mapping drifting clouds from memory, removing thorns from the paws of lions, and cultivating birds’ nests in his armpits. Occasionally, when both of them were sleeping, their dreams drifted into each other like two rivers flowing into a delta. The half who’d wandered off told his twin about swimming naked across the Bosporus below a full moon’s raving current, summiting Kilimanjaro, and sailing the Pacific in a hand-rigged catamaran with naught but stars to guide him. He said nothing about his time in the wilderness. Nor how lessening the suffering of living things sometimes brought him a transient sense of peace. In turn, he heard about trips to Disney Land with children he never knew he had, job promotions, and glowing pride at paying off the mortgage. But he never learned about the piles of other debts, months in rehab, or the divorce. Each secretly hoped, sometimes, the lightning would fuse back what it had split in two and give them that other life they’d missed out on. The lightning had a lot of chances to do this but always delayed, not because it knew better, but because it was waiting for one of them to tell the other the truth first.
David Luntz's work is forthcoming or has appeared in Pithead Chapel, Vestal Review, BULL, Best Small Fictions, trampset, X-R-A-Y Lit, Rejection Letters, Maudlin House, HAD, and other print and online journals. Twitter @luntz_david
This piece appeared in The Editor's Showcase in Janus Literary as "A Fable of Two Halves" in June 2022.
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