Electric

When Matthew changed the bulb that night, he was already charged with the fullness of the hours behind him. The front porch light at the new house had run its course. The last tenant had left bulbs- an unspoken civility among renters- but lord only knows when the bulb was originally installed.

On his way out to meet a contemporary for a nightcap, Matthew stepped back into the house from the darkness of his porch. He'd done most of the packing and so knew where to find a bulb. You wouldn't find it on his resume, but changing lightbulbs was something at which he was quite proficient.

He took the top off the lamp, unscrewed the bad bulb and turned the new one in. On came the light. There, he thought, but when he closed the door, the light went out again. That's odd.

Upon unscrewing the successive bad one, it broke, quite simply, between his thumb and forefinger. It was like a balloon of sorts- just tensile enough to resist but completely absent from touch upon implosion. He wasn't cut. Before he even thought to be thankful for escaping incisions on his most-used fingerpads of the dominant hand, he set to seeing if he could unscrew it.

He pinched a still-connected shard gently and turned in the wrong direction. It didn't budge. Lefty loosey, he reminded himself, and rotated the hull of the bulb the other way. His fingers were actually in between the antennae of the bulb, but it was his opposite hand in which he felt something.

With his left hand, he pressed his thumb against the pointy bottom of the lamp for a counter pressure against which to turn the bulb. When he felt a tingling in his left thumb, he didn't recoil straightaway. Is that the blood draining from my hand, he wondered, in one of those split second thoughts before he realized that, no, it was not. He forgot to flip the switch back down before messing with the broken bulb.

Matthew was no Nikolai Tesla; he didn't know from Shinola when it came to circuitry, but even driving away from the now-lit porch, he could feel a phantom shard in his thumb and tried to wrap his mind around it. What odd chance he had; what curious exception he'd been meted.

Am I really driving away, he wondered, or were the laws of the universe actually in full effect within him? Was he actually lying with hair frazzled as Nikolai's? Were there actually lightning bolts coursing through the blacks of his pupils behind closed eyelids?

Because he could still feel it- through his forearms and when he smiled, he felt it in the corners of his mouth.

--Matthew Mercer