Astrapaphobia
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T.O.P.P.I.T stood for �The Only Pizza Place In Town.� The town of Upland didn�t boast much. There were also places which could have been named The Only Barber Shop In Town or The Only Video Rental In Town.

T.O.P.P.I.T. was an old house, renovated to accommodate a cashier counter, a kitchen, and a very small dining room crammed with six booths, a table, and an old-fashioned Ms. PacMan video game table. The dark carpet had been worn by the boots of every townie and transient college kid for the past 27 years. The motif hadn�t changed from its original accumulation of randomly signed posters and antique junk.

T.O.P.P.I.T. was situated on a residential street, which was in an Indiana grid of similar Indiana streets with names like Second, Fifth, and Washington. About five or so blocks of residences to the south was the start of campus offices; a couple of brick buildings abutting a row of houses and opening onto a green lawn with less-than-notable statuary. Over a few football-fields worth of cookie-cutter, brick academic buildings and a chapel with the distinction of a stained-glass window, stood the dorms, nestled up next to the edge of a great, golden sea of wheat fields blowing in the Indiana wind.

In a dormitory on this border, our stomachs grumbled.

The day had been fair. Bright sunshine and warm breezes followed every student from class to class and called them to repose on the lawn with blankets, snacks, and their books.

When we slipped on our sneakers, I did not hesitate. When we stepped outside, around the corner of the building, and made ready to cross the street, a pleasantly chilly wind hit us. I looked up to the western sky. There were dark blue clouds forming low. I swayed. Ebba, however, did not. We waited in the boys� dorm lobby for Martin. Ebba started a conversation with the guy working the front desk, and I inspected the vending machines. Then�while perusing the B1 through B9 row�in the pit of registering sound, was a noise so low and so quiet that only the acute fear in me sensed it. Thunder, in the distance. No one else seemed to notice.

My only hope was that it would start to pour soon, deterring us from our plans.

Ebba�s conversation continued and my eyes fell over the same line of candy bars five or six times. I knew my face was starting to show the tension I felt more and more keenly with each nearing thunder growl. As a lightning bolt flashed close to the building and lit up the room, Ebba looked to me, questions in her eyes. She was in a mood. I could tell these were not sympathetic questions. These were annoyed.

Martin came down the stairs talking of the thunder and his decision to beat the storm to T.O.P.P.I.T. I was nauseous. I would have to excuse myself, slink back across the street to my dorm room, and hole myself up for the night. I continued feigning interest in the vending machine items, but in my mind I replayed those questions in Ebba�s eyes. And from under some rock in my chest, a small fighting spirit emerged and rallied.

I wondered: Just how far could I make it? If I could stand under the pillars at the front of the building, I would be impressed. So I went to those pillars and I stood. With the sky churning far above the building and I, I looked out across the vast, green lawn and at the brick building-sentinels lining the campus. I pictured the streets beyond those buildings�laying straight and flat�past house after house after house to the storefront of T.O.P.P.I.T.

When the first drop of rain landed next to my toe, I took a step. I�ve never melted in the rain, but I was liable to get electrocuted and die.

One twilight when I was a child�I couldn�t have been more than nine years old�I was happy in my footed pajamas and in my little lavender-colored room. It was nearing bedtime, and I was playing alone on the brown, shag carpet. It was still light outside when it started to storm. Interested in the rain on the windowpane, I crossed my arms on the �sill and listened to the rain, watching the greyness of a storm rolling over. As I looked around our little yard, a great streak of blue-white light flashed, eating all my vision for a moment, and I jumped back from the window. A CARACK! broke against the house and rumbled under my feet and in the walls. I tore out of my room and down the hallway. A heavy silence was in the house. I found myself alone in the kitchen. The linoleum floor was cool under bare feet and I listened to the patter of raindrops on the windows and the sliding glass door. The eye-level height of the tan counter held the glare of the storm�s greyness. When the speakerphone turned on as if by an invisible hand, I screamed bloody murder. I later learned that the lightning bolt that had hit in our front yard had also hit our neighbor�s pool. After that revelation, I saw it in my memory as a blue claw of brilliant light, writhing in the air and opening its palm toward my house.

Apparently I had never gotten over that experience.

I forgot the story�s details with few-to-no tellings, but I carried it, nonetheless, like a talisman against letting myself be free to ride out a storm in peace. I imagined myself throwing my face to an approaching storm cloud, tossing wet, dreads of hair over my squared, shoulders. A long skirt, wet to the grass and a smile like a Cheshire to greet the licks of lightning. But I kept a knot in my stomach: a knot that twisted so tight it spread out and crippled my legs, pulled my hands into tight fists, and stilled my heart. I took another step. And another.

I probably told Martin that I was an astrapophobe. Maybe he was with me during a former storm. As I took my tenth-ish step, I heard him say that I wasn�t going to make it. He didn�t mean that I was going to get struck by lightning, of course, but that I was going to seek shelter before I would walk all the way to T.O.P.P.I.T. My hands stung with a yearning to crawl into the nearest building and go to the basement, in the dark, and hide, but I resented Martin�s bid on my fear.

I was in high school when my friends decided to help me get over my phobia. We were at a summer camp in Michigan, and it was the dead of night. A storm was raging. Almost every teenager at camp was outside, playing in the rain, inattentive to their flaunting death for an adrenaline rush. I was huddled safely inside the cafeteria with a handful of Euchre players, in the closest thing I could get to the fetal position without embarrassing myself. I was firmly convinced that at least one of my friends was going to die that night. But Joel didn�t want me to any fun. He somehow convinced me that going out with him into the storm would be the way to conquer my fears. I tentatively entered the whipping rain (blinking into the darkness) and the spasmodic lightning (wincing with each flash) and the loudness of the thunder. I slipped into the storm cautiously, clinging to Joel�s arm. Once he coaxed me from the building, he decided to lead me further; to a bare hill in the middle of the cabins. Clever. I was so terrified, I couldn�t pull myself from his arm, so I went with him. He triumphed at dragging me onto the hill. When he released me to watch me stand and brave the storm alone, a lightning bolt pierced the sky above me, breaking three ways and spreading a net of purpley light and black on the clouds. One arm of lightning licked down at a tree near the bottom of the hill, which I was directly facing. I stood frozen, wide-eyed, listening to the thunder echo for a whole minute after. Then the power went out in all the buildings below. In the sudden dark, I screamed and screamed. I ran reeling for Joel. I gasped for air, screamed, tried to climb Joel�s body while I hyperventilated. I was carried inside, soaking wet, a brown paper bag placed over my nose and mouth. It was later that year when I heard it�s not a good idea to make a true phobic face their worst fear cold-turkey.

I agreed with Martin�s wager that I couldn�t make it to T.O.P.P.I.T. He was gambling safe, but the dice were in my hand.

Ebba and Martin let me walk half a block ahead of them across campus and onto the residential street. It started to drizzle and the sky behind the clouds was darkening with night. I had been walking for ten minutes or so; maybe halfway there. My legs moved without my brain. I desperately wanted to stop. I shuddered, shivered, jumped with each growl of thunder. When the lightning flashed, I thought I might die and I cried a little, until the rain on my face tasted salty and my eyes swelled.

I knew a man who was struck by lightning. Remarkably, he lived through it. He told me what it was like. He said he felt it coming like electricity on his skin. His hair stood up. And in that split second there was nothing that he could do but know: he was the target, it was his destiny. This acquaintance of mine was hit with the same bolt of lightning as a young girl, they being on the top of the same mountain. (I think she died.) The lightning burnt holes in the soles of his shoes, and he went sort of funny-in-the-head. Nicest guy you�d ever meet, but he convulsed regularly while talking to you, and stuttered.

I figured I�d die if I was hit. I also figured since I was so afraid of being hit, that death-by-lightning would be the way I died. Never mind that it would be more ironic if I spent my whole life terrified of dying that way and then I died being eaten by an alligator or getting run over by a train or peacefully in my sleep of old age. Death is ironic. And it�s absolutely awkward the way we balk at it and resist it.

Lightning wasn�t my only phobia. I was also terrified of cats, of the dark (especially in the woods), and somewhat of heights: a regular ailuro-nycto(-hylo)-contrelto-acro-phobe. But lightning was my colossus.

I hoped one day I�d kick my phobia because I appreciated the beauty of a storm. I loved the rain: the wetness of it; the coolness and the warmth together; the way it falls out of the sky at you in lines and curves. I loved the colors of lightning and the sheer brilliance of it, the surprise of discovering where the next lightning streak will come from, and where and how it will go. The grumble of thunder. The boom. The quake. But these are things I saw only through little holes�between fingers and through windowpanes�and at great distances, with much dread and anxiety.

I was on the residential street now, avoiding puddles, because of course we all know that standing water and electricity do not mix well. I was walking fast and I was making as many bee-lines through short distances as I could. I could still hear Ebba and Martin at a distance behind me, talking and laughing in the rain and splashing around in the puddles. I doubted I would ever go quite as far as their toying with danger. But I was more than halfway to the pizza parlor. Now, if I wanted to seek shelter, I would have to knock on somebody�s door to do it and that would just be ridiculous.

I imagined myself doing just that; going up to each door that I passed, screaming and banging on the door, begging to be let in. Alternately, I imagined explaining myself calmly to a mystified person who answered the door. In all fantasies, they had to let me in at the end. I was, after all, an innocent-looking college girl who was desperate and I wouldn�t take no for an answer. So I dreamed of many escapes, without averting my eyes from the straight, glistening street. I went straight ahead and stared with zombie eyes, bracing myself for the next flash of lightning; tightening my muscles against the brief panic, the primal fear.

In the near-dark, the T.O.P.P.I.T. neon sign surprised me. I was walking fast, but not running because that was part of the deal with myself: I would walk all the way. Ebba�s and Martin�s flirtatious voices had been swept up into the wind and rain a block or two earlier. It was me, on the threshold of T.O.P.P.I.T.; and them in my mind, walking nonchalantly in the darkness and the play of house-lights on the sidewalk. I was wide-eyed, choked with fear, thinking I had made it all that way to be struck through an open window.

I tripped into the shop, the welcome bell dinging above me. I crumpled myself into a soggy ball on the floor, the old-fashioned Ms. Pac Man table blurping next to me, while four wide eyes looked down at me over the edge.

copyright by devon, 2002.