The power went out around ten in the morning that Saturday. Later, pea-sized hail thrashed the tiny leaves off the mesquite tree in the front yard. Jerry was sprawled out on his screen porch’s love seat, watching the barrage. And between the deafening thunder and the raucous hail downpour, he no longer heard Sammi in the kitchen, free-throwing frozen food into the trash.

Next, Jerry sat up and couldn’t believe what he saw through the drenched screens. A small figure in an enormous jacket ran down the middle of the street, arms raised, the unwieldy jacket’s sleeves flopping like broken wings. Then in a moment the chaotic hailstorm transformed into a gentle curtain of misty rain. Everything Jerry saw filled with intense light, as if a circle of spotlights turned their gigantic beams into the small screen porch. Thunder went off directly overhead like an atom bomb. Jerry knew the small person wearing the enormous jacket probably was struck and saw the figure crouched in the middle of the street, as tight as a pill bug.

Jerry watched the small person rise, then run toward his house, across his white covered lawn, and up to his screen door. He thought, My Lord, it’s one of my kids!

Michael Webster.

“My Lord, Michael,” Jerry called out. “What are you doing out in this?”

Michael Webster stepped into the screen porch, wet and trembling. The enormous jacket was only a thin windbreaker, and Jerry couldn’t tell if the boy was crying or if it was rain. The boy told his middle school teacher that his parents were both at work and the lights and TV had gone off a while ago. The phone was off, too. Sammi appeared at the doorway leading into the house.

“Great calamities of calamities, did you hear—oh, who’s this?”

“This is one of my students,” Jerry said. “Michael this is my wife, Mrs. Pettigrew.”

Michael’s large eyes stared at Sammi’s baggy shorts and bare knees and wild, frizzy hair on top of her head and the box of melted enchiladas in her hand.

“Jerry, a minute.” Her eyes furrowed. “Nice to meet you, sweetie.”

In the kitchen, behind the shut door, Sammi wanted to know if this was the Michael Webster. Jerry said it was the very same. Jerry complained every day about how disruptive the boy was in his third period class, how he took every opportunity to distract the other students in the most inappropriate ways. It didn’t surprise Jerry at all that the boy was home alone during the storm. Obviously, Mr. and Mrs. Webster were the origin of Michael’s acting up. Since they ignored Jerry’s many emails and phone calls home, it was obvious that Michael’s parents ignored their son, too.

“Kids his age are home alone all the time,” Sammi said. “Why would he come here?”

“I don’t know. The dark probably terrified him. Bullies are like that, right?”

“Should we do something? He should come in and dry off.”

“That little shitwad is not stepping one foot in this house.”

Jerry went back out to the porch, all smiles.

“How do you know where I live, Michael?”

  “I followed you once,” the boy said, still shivering. “When you walked home.”

Jerry thought it best to let that one go, for now. He wondered how far the boy had traveled in the storm. The middle school was a few blocks away. More than a few blocks?

“That lightning almost got you, huh?”

Michael nodded.

“You almost got fried like an egg.” Jerry smirked.

Michael shrugged. “Almost,” he mouthed.

They sat next to each other on the love seat.

“This is a big jacket. You can use it as a tent out in this weather, if you wanted.”

“It’s my daddy’s.”

“What is your dad wearing?”

The boy shrugged and watched the rain pick up speed once more. Michael stared at two small bicycles and two rolled up sleeping bags in the corner of the porch.

“Where are your kids? I saw them playing on the grass when I rode my bike by one time.” Then he added, sadly, “I don’t have a bike now.”

“They’re with their mother.” Michael looked at the closed door. Jerry said, “In another state, with my ex-wife.”

“My aunt’s divorced, too.” He twisted his lips in an exaggerated way. “So, since your kids don’t live with you, you left them.”

“They visit me, Michael. All the time.”

“My aunt left her kids and moved in with my uncle, but I don’t call him uncle. I call him Rodney. That lady inside got kids?”

Jerry started to feel like he did with Michael most days.

“Yes, Michael. My wife had kids with her first husband and they live with him.”

“She left them, too,” the boy said, and nodded knowingly.

“Don’t be acting up in my house, Michael.”

“I’m not in your house.”

“Yes, you are. And I’m being nice to let you sit here, out of the rain and thunder and lightning.”

They watched the rain, hearing the faraway booms of thunder.

“I wasn’t acting up,” the boy finally said. “I know when I’m acting up, and I wasn’t just then, I swear it.”

Jerry looked at his student. “Why did you come here?”

“Besides school, this is the only place I know you’d be.”

Jerry pursed his lips and continued staring at Michael Webster. The rain pattered the sheet metal roof of the screen porch like falling marbles. Soon Jerry felt the skin on his face go slack. He stood up. “That is a sorry excuse for a tent,” he said, pointing at the soaked windbreaker. “Let’s go inside and get you dried off.”

# # #

Dan Crawley’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of journals, including Wigleaf, apt, Gravel, SmokeLong Quarterly: The Best of the First Ten Years, matchbook, and Jellyfish Review. He is a recipient of an Arizona Commission on the Arts creative writing fellowship.