from Michael

There was a night, back when he was still young, when Michael’s luck turned around. There was a great Midwestern storm, with rain as hard as diamonds and lightning that split a tree down the center as Michael awoke sitting erect in his child bed. In the instant that the tree was struck his room was hot and washed in sudden sepia. Having been pulled from a soft dream, he sat alert, his heart a heavy anchor thrown overboard and plunging into deep water. He breathed as quietly as possible until he began putting names to the sounds around him, until he knew for sure that the sounds were not coming from his mother’s room.
His father, the third point in the irregular triangle, had long ago disappeared, passed over to that place where fathers of children of these sorts of mothers go to. Since then his mother went on telling the same story, insistent, that the father of her sweet boy had been an angel who had flew through her bedroom window. “Look what he left me.” She would say, trailing a hand over the face and neck of her handsome boy. “Look what he brought me from heaven.”