At that moment, a nurse came in, raising her eyebrows when she saw me. “Oh, you’re awake! How long have you been awake for?”

            “A few minutes,” Lizzie answered.

            The nurse shook her head. “It just keeps getting stranger.” She approached the bed I was sitting in and, despite her perplexed expression, gave me a warm smile. “How are you feeling Beck?”

            “Weird,” I admitted, still getting a strange buzzy feeling around me. “It’s hard to describe. I feel alright in the head and all, and I’m not in pain, but it’s like… there’s some sort of pressure…” I trailed off unable to keep describing it.

            “Not in pain…” she repeated, quickly grabbing a clipboard to write. “Where are you feeling the pressure?”

            I bit my bottom lip as I stayed still to focus. “Everywhere…” I said after a pause. “It’s like… I feel like I just rubbed my entire body on a balloon or wool or something and I’m about to get the biggest static shock of my life.”

            The nurse notes down what I said and purses her lips. For a bit she doesn’t say anything, and she’s clearly trying to understand something. “I… Alright, I guess.”

            “Nurse, do you know what’s wrong?” Lizzie asked desperately. “Is he going to be okay?”

            She sighed and shrugged. “Beck, I don’t know how to say this, but nothing about your condition makes any sense. Taking out the survival probability, you should frankly be in intense pain, whether externally through burns or internally through severe nerve damage. It’s a miracle you’re somehow awake, and not even a full five hours since you were struck, let alone completely without injury.”

            “A miracle…” I muttered to myself. A word that had lost all its meaning thanks to my family.

            I was not a religious person, but my mom was. She used to drag me and my younger siblings to church until Dad convinced her to let us decide our own religious pathing. Me and my brother James elected not to go, while my sister Eliza decided to follow in Mom’s footsteps. Mom was a bit fussy about our decision, wishing that we had chosen a path of faith and bugging us about it for a long time, but strangely was less insistent on this than she was on other things in the house. Miracle was one of her favorite words, using it to describe nearly every accomplishment we had in our lives. Acing my midterm? Miracle. James getting third in his cycling race? Miracle. Eliza getting invited to the popular girl party at her middle school? Miracle. Frankly, Mom’s excessive use of the word pushed me further from the church. How could miracles be miracles if they occurred so commonly and so easily?

            Then again, how else could I possibly describe my impossible survival?

            “What about the static thing?” Lizzie persisted.

            The nurse pursed her lips again. “Truth be told, I’ve never seen this before, or even heard of it. Granted, I’ve never dealt with a patient who’s been struck by lightning, and information about this kind of thing is limited. But the condition of holding a seemingly permanent state of imbalanced electrons causing infinite static shocks is… well simply fictional, even by the laws of physics.”

            “Wait, really?” I said in surprise.

            “Yeah, couldn’t it just be, like, residual electricity in his body from the bolts?”

            The nurse shook her head. “That, unfortunately, is not how electricity works. The state you seem to be in is caused from, as I said before, an imbalanced number of electrons in your body. Getting struck by lightning does not cause that kind of effect on the body, and even if it did, it would not stay in the body over a long period of time. By all accounts, he should’ve discharged and balanced out the charge in his body by now.”

            “Are you a physicist or something?” Lizzie asked bewildered. “I wouldn’t think this is the kind of thing they teach you in nursing school…”

            She smiled at Lizzie. “We weren’t required to learn it, but I’ve always been a bit of a physics girl growing up. The Museum of Science was a big inspiration actually.”

            “My uncle works at the lightning show there actually!” Lizzie laughed.

            “So I’ve heard,” the nurse chuckled.

            “Guys!” I shouted, grabbing their attention. Both seemed a little embarrassed by the tangent.

            The nurse cleared her throat. “Anyways, the thing that concerns me most is that this strange phenomenon occurred well after the actual incident. It would be one thing if this was a condition he sustained right away, but he only got these strange static reactions recently. To me, that’s worrying, as it could indicate that the side effects might not be done showing up. I highly suspect that he may have sustained some kind of internal damage that might not develop until later.”

            “What kinds of side effects?” I asked with a bit of a gulp.

            She stared at her clipboard distractedly before another sigh. “Given the bizarre nature of your current symptom, anything’s possible at this point. But if I were treating this like normal, then you could be looking at possible strokes, brain hemorrhages, and very likely muscle decay. You might find yourself unable to move certain parts of your body.”

            Lizzie and I shared an uncomfortable glance. During the silence, the stupid buzzing of my static was starting to become far more noticeable. “Isn’t there anything I can do about this static?”

            The nurse gave an exaggerated shrug. “You could try discharging by touching something metallic.”

            I noticed at metal leg on the bed I was sitting on, and I reached over to touch it. As expected, a little electrical spark came and shocked me. Lizzie and the nurse both winced, but I stared confused at my finger. “It… it didn’t hurt at all. I didn’t feel a thing.”

            Lizzie gaped and stared at the nurse, who just shook her head at the ridiculousness and jotted down some more notes on her clipboard. I tried a couple more times, but every time I touched the leg it just kept shocking me.

            The nurse stood. “I’m going to let Dr. Glint know you’re awake, and we’re going to redo some of the routine check-up procedures now that you’re conscious.” With a small nod, she swiftly left the room, leaving me and my unbelievably stressed girlfriend. I wanted so bad to hold her hand and tell her that I was ok, that I wasn’t in pain. But I knew just how untruthful it would come off. Sure, I wasn’t in pain now, but the nurse was clear that I should be expecting more symptoms. There’s no way I could’ve possibly come out of this with nothing more than a strange static reaction. Besides, in the state I was in now, holding her hand would only result in another static shock.

            Lizzie’s phone rang, and she looked at the caller ID. “It’s Frank. I’ll be right back.” I nodded and she too left the room, leaving me alone in the hospital bed.

            I hugged my knees again, staring at nothing in particular. I was alive. Somehow, miraculously, I was alive. And without a single scratch either. What the nurse said toward the end still bothered me though. This strange static condition might not be the last long-term effect that I develop. Strokes… Brain hemorrhages… Muscle deteriorations… All because I reached outside that damn cage.

            What even happened? Why had my mind become so suddenly blank during the show? I had always thought the lightning looked so beautiful when in the audience, but up there… it was a whole other level of enticing. The strangely elegant patterns the bolts took to travel to the cage, just to reach me… I was literally entranced. And I swear I felt like the bolts were somehow calling me to them. Instinctively I waved my arm around a bit to make sure I wasn’t still out of control. I sighed. Maybe I really was just stupid and forgot the routine and just wanted to do something dumb. The same kind of stupid thought that comes when you’re at the top of a building and you just wonder what it would feel like to jump off. You know it makes no sense, but for whatever reason, it’s tempting anyways. I clutched my head in frustration. I couldn’t think straight. And this stupid buzzing was only making things worse. It was loud and obnoxious, especially in a quiet room I had to myself. Why won’t you just stop!? I pled in my mind. Just go away stupid buzzing!

            Out of nowhere a strange feeling overcame me all at once. It felt like my body was suddenly absorbing the strange invisible energy that had swarmed me, and it all pressured internally. The pressure slipped through my arms, my legs, my head, travelling through veins and congregating in my chest. The strange current gathered at my heart and got absorbed into it. And suddenly, in the span of two seconds, there was nothing. No buzzing, no pressure, nothing.

            I blinked. What had just happened? I stared at my arms as though they had been the cause. Was… was it really gone? Turning my head, I reached over the bed again to touch the metal leg, and this time I felt nothing. No shock, no resistance. My eyebrows shot upward. My condition, unbelievably, was gone. Like it had never existed.

            Did… did I do that? Did I just mentally command my body to stop shocking people? Did my frustrated thoughts suck the static electricity into myself? No, that was ridiculous. The nurse had repeatedly explained that I should have discharged the electricity in my body after only a couple of shocks. It couldn’t have been anything I did while sitting and hugging my knees. But then how? Did the electrons in my body just… escape? Into… my heart? I put a hand to my heart and let it beat. It felt completely normal. In fact, I overall felt entirely normal, like nothing had ever happened. I felt no pain on my fingers, the ones that had reached over the cage. I felt no pain in my heart, which had a strong steady heartbeat. By all accounts… I was healthy.