the sound of thunder

Nearly every summer afternoon in the south of Florida a thunderstorm rolls in. The sky turns almost as dark as night sometimes, and the air feels heavy and saturated with the rain about to come. The thunderheads build up like mountains in the distance. The wind begins to blow. Animals sense the storm and run wild toward the edges of their confines; the trees sway in anticipation.
Drops sprinkle down randomly at first without much coverage. Women who have blown dry their hair dodge the drops on the way to shelter. Tourists clear the beaches and move to the bars. From a mild sprinkle erupts a pouring river from the sky. The raindrops, so large, feel to the skin like falling nails. They fall so close together that it seems like there must not be any space at all between them. A flash of lightning illuminates the black sky. One mississippi, two mississippi, three mississippi, four mississippi, five mississippi........Boom! It hit five miles away. The sound of the rain is deafening on a tin roof. The front porch with no screen is like an auditorium for the show. The best seat is at the edge of the front steps with your feet in the rain. Another flash cuts through the sky. It looks like veins made of pure light. One mississippi, two mississippi, three mississippi.......BOOM! Three miles away those veins of light have reached the ground. The sound of the rain seems smoother now. Your ears have adjusted to its constancy. On the porch, the rocking chairs rock a bit with the encouragement of the wind. The land is covered with puddles. The laundry, still on the line, is wet again.
Electricity cuts through the sky once more, reaching for the surface of the soaked earth below. The long driveway, completely coated with a thick surface of ever-falling raindrops, looks like a mirror with a flashlight shined on it in response to the light show in the sky. One mississippi, two mississippi...CRACK! The ground shakes. Two miles. The crack is so loud that adrenaline courses through your body as you feel it. Leaves have been blown from the trees, and the dead palmetto fronds that had been hanging on now litter the ground. Water pours off the edge of the roof above onto your feet in a solid, narrow sheet, hinting at the design of the tin roof with its divided sections: presumably the only thing standing in the way of the view being obstructed by a solid sheet of water.
A fierce bolt of maybe a million volts lands a direct hit on the tree in the front yard while the simultaneous CRACKKKKK causes you to nearly jump out of your skin. The tree is charred, cooked molecularly from the inside out and scarred permanently. A deep gash shows, like a cut to the bone, filleted wide open is the secret inside of the pine that once stood like a pillar at the edge of the drive.