“Come.”

            The endless field felt greyer than it usually did. Less colorful. Less vibrant. I looked toward the clouds, ever darkening, ever intimidating. I wasn’t afraid. After all, they had what I wanted.

            “Open your heart.”

            I think there was a voice. It was as quiet as the soft wind around me, blowing my hair backward. It was low, yet comforting. Powerful, yet alluring. Quiet, yet clear. And strangely familiar. Where had I heard this strange voice before? Was there even a voice there? It didn’t matter. I walked forward anyways, knowing what I had to do.

            “Embrace yourself.”

            I opened my arms out as I was commanded to. By who? The storm above me rumbled, and as expected, a small flash rippled. This time, a bolt of electricity slowly wormed its way down from the clouds above. I watched it as it moved as though in slow motion, toward my body. It was snakelike, zigzagging as it so wished, and moving without much care in the world. It continued its descent through the air, plummeting down until it was right next to me. It seemed to pause for a split second, as though the head of the bolt was observing me, watching me.

            “Open.”

            The bolt plunged its way into my heart and I immediately felt the power rise into my body. The slow motion was over, the power charged in an instant.

            “OW!”

            A voice jolted me from my slumber and a strange painless feeling ran through my body in a fraction of a second. Breathing heavily to recover from the sudden transition to consciousness, my eyes cleared to find a startled Lizzie, clutching her left forearm and rubbing it, her face like a deer caught in headlights. We had a miniature stare-down as I gathered my breath. “What… happened?” I said, before freezing in realization.

            It was happening again.

            I shot my eyes down at my own arms and held them out like they had betrayed me. I felt the buzzing before I heard it, the goosebumps already formed, my body subtly vibrating with energy. I felt my hair stand up on its end, saw the sheets of the hotel bed attached to my legs like magnets. Shit… not again…

            “It’s back!” Lizzie exclaimed. Before I could even grasp the situation, she fell backwards off the bed, landed promptly on her feet, and rushed to a nearby table where her phone was charging.

            “Wait, what are you doing?” I said alarmed, still holding my arms out like they were poisonous to the rest of my body.

            She looked at me, panicked. “The doctors said to alert them if this happened again, right? I’m calling them.”

            “W-Wait!” I said, starting to get to my own feet. Frustratingly, the sheets of the bed were making my escape very tough, sticking to my leg hairs like glue. “You’re making me go back!?”

            “What else are we going to do Beck?” she snapped. “Oh God, where are my glasses, I can’t read the damn text on the screen!”

            I paled. I had only just escaped the confines of the hospital room, I really didn’t want to go back so soon. I didn’t need to endure Mom’s endless badgering, Lizzie’s constant worries, Frank’s constant phone calls, Dr. Robbins’ constant comparisons of my miraculous survival to that of miracles. “Lizzie, come on, it’s ok. We don’t have to call them yet, it went away last time! Let’s just see if it goes away!”

            Lizzie shook her head and finally put her glasses on. “Beck, no. This whole situation is freaky, I can’t stand the idea of something being wrong with you and not doing anything about it.”

            “But I feel fine!” I begged. And I did. Even if I felt the weird static electricity surround my frame, I was in no pain, and I didn’t feel the slightest bit sick. Hell, my energy had completely returned as well. “Lizzie, please, just hold on!”

            She shook her head. “Damn it, what’s their fucking number!?” She turned her back and paced aimlessly toward the front door, out of sight.

            Damn it… Just when I thought I could catch a freaking break… Why? Why is the stupid static back again? Is it going to go away? As though mocking me, the field increased in intensity, sending goosebumps all around my skin and buzzing even louder. In a panic I desperately thought back to how it had gone away the first time, racking my brain for the memory. I had been clutching my knees on a hospital bed, and it just… disappeared. With no explanation as to why. Well, almost. The only other thing I could remember about that moment was just how frustrated I was with the buzzing that I practically begged it to go away. For some reason, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had willed the static field out of existence. It made no sense, and I really wanted to dismiss the idea the moment it reentered my head. But for lack of a better option, and out of desperation, I scrunched my eyes shut. Go away, go away, go away! I screamed internally.

            I froze when the temperature in my body shifted all of a sudden, going from a mild shiver to an inexplicable burst of warmth. A familiar feeling enveloped me as I felt a strange pull from everywhere in my body at once. I gave a shout of surprise when, even quicker than in the hospital, the invisible static electricity got absorbed into my body and travelled inwardly through my body. My innards itched as the static flow tickled my nerves, again convening at my heart. A beat later, and the flow was gone, disappearing somewhere into the confines of my heart again.

            I hesitated for a second to realize what had just happened. That was no coincidence. But I shook my head. Process later. “Lizzie!” I called, getting to my feet finally. “It’s gone! It’s gone! Come here!”

            I reached the main walkway path where Lizzie turned around in shock, one hand on her phone, the number for the hospital displayed and ready to be called. I held out my hands in a stopping pose. We had another stare-down as Lizzie had her finger up and ready to press the button. She glanced up to see my hair flat on my head and her eyes widened. “What… I don’t understand…”

            “Calling them isn’t going to do anything now,” I said, leaning my hands further forward. “It’s already gone, so we’d just be telling them things that they already know. Please Lizzie, I don’t want to go back so soon. I’m fine, really!”

            She blinked over and over, shaking her head completely baffled. I could tell she was having a civil war in her head. She reopened her eyes and locked eyesight. “The doctors insisted we tell them if anything happened,” Lizzie reminded me, but lowered her hand, and turned off the screen on her phone. “Maybe we don’t have to go in, but we should still tell them that you’re getting symptoms.”

            I relaxed seeing her no longer in a rush to make the call. “We don’t have to do that now though, or even today. Let’s just call them first thing tomorrow morning. Please Lizzie? Just one evening to ourselves, not swarmed with doctors or tests or whatever?”

            A glint of understanding went through her eyes, and after a brief rubbing of her forehead she nodded. “Fine. But I’ve got my eye on you Beck.”

            I grinned. “You don’t already?”

            “I’m serious,” she snapped coldly. “Beck, after the years and years of CHD symptoms, the many cardiac arrest hospital calls my family and I have had to deal with in my life, I’m taking every inch of this situation seriously. I’ve already lost a sister, a grandmother, and an uncle to heart disease, I’m not losing you to some electricity stunt because you refuse to go to a fucking hospital.”

            My heart dropped and my face lost all color. “Lizzie…” I whispered. “I… I didn’t mean to open up those wounds again…”

            “Well, you did,” she fumed, no humor in her voice whatsoever. She wandered back to the bed, dropping her phone with a bounce on the bed mattress, and immediately lost her face into her hands. “Just promise me we go to the hospital right away if it happens again, alright?”

            “We can go to the hospital right now if you want.” I sat down next to her and rubbed her back slowly. All my defenses melted away in a second. As much as I didn’t want to go back, nothing was more important to me than Lizzie’s wellbeing. I’d do just about anything to cheer her up, and if that meant dropping everything and marching right back into the hospital, I was all for it. “I was being selfish. It’s the safe thing to do.”

            She only sighed and shook her head. “No, you’re probably right. So long as it’s gone, there’s not really anything new they can do. Chances are they’d make us walk right back out and charge us some more. I’ll call Dr. Glint tomorrow morning about it though, he should at least have confirmation that it came back. Why did it come back though? And how did it go away so fast this time? That was like… thirty seconds!”

            I was equally as baffled as she was, my mind working to form some credible explanation my body’s strange behavior. “Maybe it was just a normal static shock?” I suggested, convincing neither of us. There was no way this was a simple static shock. That feeling of gathering static electricity in your body did not match how I felt in the hospital, or a minute ago. The SFE, as the doctor called it, had returned, and left as quickly as it had shown up. But why?

            Thinking back, I relived the two times I had woken up with the SFE, trying to figure out some kind of connection between them. They certainly felt identical. Both times it happened, I was submerged in some invisible field of static electricity that was putting small bits of pressure on my skin, making me feel all tingly. There was a subtle yet unrelenting buzzing sound that attacked my ears. The first time it happened, I was unconscious in the hospital, and it happened mid-sleep, while the nurses were working on me. The second time, a few minutes ago, I was napping with Lizzie when she got shocked and woke me up.

            I cocked my head to the side in sudden recognition. Both times the field emerged I was asleep. Was that the connection? No, not just asleep, I thought with another sudden understanding. Dreaming.

            Both times I awoke with SFE, I had awoken from that dream, the one that I’d had three times now, where I walked on an endless plain, before stopping in front of a lightning storm and getting struck in the heart. I dismissed it earlier as just another nightmare because of a traumatic event. But now? I was starting to feel like it wasn’t any coincidence. The dreams had always felt different in an unexplainable way. They felt more real, like I was actually feeling the power from the electricity seep into my body. Charging me. Charging me… with static electricity?

            But wait, I’d had the dream three times since the accident, not two. This morning I woke up after having the dream, but I didn’t have any static electricity then. So why not?

            Wait… This morning, Lizzie had said that she thought she heard buzzing from me last night. She had thought the condition had returned. My eyes shot open. It did return, didn’t it!? She really did hear me buzzing! If I really had emitted another static field in my sleep, that would make it a perfect three for three. Once was an event, two was a coincidence, three was a pattern. Somehow, I knew. That dream and the static electricity were linked. But if so, why was it gone by morning?

            That first time in the hospital when the field vanished, I had convinced myself that my mental command had something to do with it. It was too specifically timed to be a coincidence, and there hadn’t been any other reason for its sudden disappearance. There was no longer a question after what just happened. In a panic, I had tried to command away the field just like I did the first time, and just like before it vanished nearly identically.

            I had to remind myself what I was starting to convince myself of. This kind of mental capability was completely impossible. It’s not possible for someone to simply wish away an illness or command an injury to go away. But nothing about this accident made any sense in the first place. Dr. Robbins said it herself, the circumstances around the static field literally defied the laws of physics that she was aware of. Lizzie had shown me several news reports covering the incident, where pedestrians, the museum staff, and even scientific experts were baffled by the electricity’s path to my heart. Was my mental dissipation of electricity really so unbelievable by comparison?

            “Beck?”

            Lizzie’s voice pierced through my thoughts and brought me back to reality. I blinked several times and shook my head. “Sorry, what did you say?”

            “Nothing,” she replied. “It just looked like you realized something there. Did you think of something?”

            I looked deep into my girlfriend’s innocent and loving eyes that hid behind her spectacles. God I loved her, but could I really tell her my crazy theory that transcended reality? If there was anyone I wanted to tell, and anyone who I could trust to keep my secret it would be Lizzie. But after what just happened, how freaked out she was from the static and how near she was to sending me right to the hospital all over again… I really didn’t want any more stress added onto anything. Let alone the fact that my theory would make me sound crazy. So I shook my head. “No, just trying to figure it all out.”

            She parted her lips skeptically. I paled a little bit, worried she knew me well enough to tell my lies. But she took a deep breath and just shook her head. “I just feel like I’m missing something…”

            “I do too…” I said, throwing an arm around her shoulder. And I meant it.