Accidental Prayer

by Harriet Sandilands

Heat Lightning | Holden Willard

E was the only person I knew who had a swimming pool, though it actually belonged to her
grandmother. It was fringed all around with raspberry bushes. Sometimes we would sneak into
the kitchen of her grandmother’s bungalow still dripping underneath our towels to make toast
lathered with butter, chocolate spread and sugar. We spent hours, days, whole summers in that
pool, designing synchronized swimming routines, staying in the water until we were wrinkled
like prunes. Once it thundered and lightninged and we remained in the water chanting Thunder!
Thunder! Come on Thunder! As though invoking some awesome God. Confused, I used to
scribble out prayers to that same God, asking him or her to take care of me and E and both our
families. The pool was deep, not embellished by fancy tiles. There may have been a diving
board. There may have been a small wooden shed for getting changed. The raspberry bushes,
prickled and dense, spoke profusely all through the summer. Hard to believe - now that
raspberries come in shallow plastic trays - just how much abundance we knew before. I wonder:
where were the adults as we swam and leapt through thunder and lightning? Were they away and
somewhere else like Louis MacNiece said of time? Four years later E’s sister was killed in a car
crash. A few years after that, her Dad had a heart attack at the top of the house where they had
installed some home gym equipment. Long out of touch, I now see pictures of E online; her
slimness always comes as a surprise. The skin around her once lovely plump thighs is loose,
though at certain angles she looks strangely lithe. I remember her dark hair and her soft body
thrashing out of the water in time with mine, her hand crammed full of raspberries, our secret
slices of toast spread with butter, chocolate and sugar. And I wonder, of everything that
happened, what was the prayer? Is it possible to pray something by accident? When we chanted
Thunder! Thunder! Come on thunder! What terrible chaos did we secretly summon? Whose
lightning was born from that heat?