The sky is crackling. Every few seconds, it belches deeply, the rumbling so pronounced that you expect the sky is removing something. Something is being torn out, perhaps, by hands we cannot see at a height we cannot see.

I love rainy nights, the unpredictability of thunder. Do you settle into your bed at night during a rainstorm to read, and think that there’s a remote, remote, almost infinitely remote chance that you could be struck by lightning, that it could stream in through the window and strike you right there in the bed? I do. Once, when I was young, our house was rocked violently for a few seconds during a storm. My parents explained it away by saying the house had been struck by lightning.

It’s time to take a bath, to turn on all the electrical appliances in the house, to open the blinds. Rainy night. Best time to read or write.