Free Lightning People by Christopher Bollen

familiarwalk to the West Side Highway where the brownstones dissolved into car washes and art galleries reminded her of their old routine: entering his studio with the wood floors glowing purple at sunset and Raj sitting shirtless at his desk, staring at photographs with a glass loop in his hand. Del would creep over to him, prizing the silence, the slight weep of the floorboards under her shoes, the clink of her keys on the dresser, the echoing motors speeding along the Hudson River. She’d slide her fingers over his collarbone, sharp as a coat hanger and strangely hot, his skin was always so relentlessly warm, and he’d drop the loop and soon they would be naked on the floor glowing purple themselves. Raj had what she always called doomed eyes . They were delicately ice blue, encased in baggy brown lids from his father’s Indian ancestry, almost fluorescent but filled with a sadness so disarming that she often wondered, even as he worked his penis into her, if pleasure for him stemmed more from a sudden lack of pain than from the spasms firing down his back. Maybe that’s what made sex with Raj so memorable. There was a sense of temporary relief, a sense that she was helping him.
    She stepped over a collection of cardboard boxes and blankets on the sidewalk, unable to determine whether someone was sleeping underneath them. She did not use the key Raj had given her when they had been a couple, although it still drifted somewhere at the bottom of her purse. Instead she rang the buzzer—a sure marker that their relationship had turned a corner in the year since their breakup.
    â€œHello?”
    â€œIt’s Del,” she said, and the door gave.
    Raj was not shirtless. He was dressed in a yellow button-down with a coffee stain smeared on the collar and loose khaki pants worn to holes in the knees. His hair had grown long and curly, fraying over his ears like a man much younger than his age. As he leaned into her at the door, she deflected a kiss that landed on her left ear.
    â€œWell,” he said, recovering from the rejection with a grin. He waved his arm back to welcome her in. “Late as usual. Glad to see some things don’t change. You don’t come over this way much anymore.”
    â€œThere aren’t many reasons to.”
    â€œHas it been too long to ask how your day was?”

    She considered telling him about the rattlesnake as she paused for a moment just inside the hallway. She didn’t know how to begin and felt that Raj was already studying her, probably determining how different she looked from the last time he had seen her almost a year ago. She swept her hand over her forehead, intentionally blocking a direct view of her face. But she was also looking for what had changed as she walked past him into the studio. His place had undergone a few renovations since she last visited. A black couch replaced two broken armchairs by the window. A bulbous metal light shone on a number of photographs tacked to the wall—interior shots in Raj’s style: cold uninhabited rooms of chilly modern design. A wire birdcage and two empty leather trunks were stacked in the far corner. Sentimental junk was not his aesthetic, and she wondered if someone else had been around the past few months renovating his room with her own sense of what a home should look like.
    â€œMy day?” she said to pick up a strand of conversation. “I texted with Madi.”
    â€œTexting with my sister is wiser than talking to her on the phone,” he laughed. “She won’t shut up. Right now she’s big on trying to talk me into going with her on a business trip to India. ‘Come on, Raj,’ she whines. ‘Let’s go see our homeland. I’ll pay for you. You can take pictures.’ I keep telling her, ‘Madi, we were born in Ft. Lauderdale. If you want to see where we came from, turn on MTV Spring Break .’ Anyway, how’s work? You still