by Charlotte Hamrick
I’m sitting in the carport of my childhood home sometime in the 1970s. I’m barefoot because it’s summer and I’m often barefoot in summer, the soles of my feet toughened from walking over country road gravel and forest footpaths. The clouds are hovering low over the treetops in the distance, tumbling shapeshifters gathering energy. The neighbors’ goats are bleating, and their bells clank as they head to the bottom of the hill. The old oak, just a few feet away, is shimmying and rattling. I’m sitting in one of those strappy aluminum lawn chairs everyone had back then, waiting. I’m probably alone – parents at work and sisters at the babysitters. I’m wondering what other kids are doing on their summer vacation. All I know is this house on this hill surrounded by pasture and forest, languishing in a line of long, daydreamy summer days.
Although physically I’m tied to this place and time, I’m mentally unbound in a place where my imagination soars. Storms are often a conduit. I dream about other places, about the future and where I might end up. I imagine living in my own house, constructing a blueprint in my head, placing furniture and artwork on the walls. I imagine living a life with details I embellish, day by day, like a serial TV show where I am the writer.
Lightning cracks the sky, thunder bellows, rain falls like puzzle pieces flung to the ground. My bare feet are crossed nonchalantly on the concrete as I watch a performance more exciting than anything created by humans.
Years later and miles away, my husband calls for me as I stand outside, daydreaming, on our concrete patio in an approaching storm. More cautious than I, he says lightning hitting wet concrete will electrocute me, and I’d best come inside where it’s safe.
Sitting on the carport, I didn’t know about lightning strikes and wet concrete. Despite living in a “tornado alley,” I didn’t think of thunderstorms as menacing. Instead, they were a display of action and release where my dreams waited for a bolt of lightning to strike, propelling me into a shape-shifted future.
Charlotte Hamrick is a creative writer whose work has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies including Best Small Fictions 2022, 2023, 2025. Her debut prose chapbook, Offset Melodies, was published in ELJ Editions’ Grieving Hope collection in 2025.
Emerge Literary Journal 