Black Lightning You are the embodiment of a good thing coming in a small package, barely five feet tall and, let's admit it, feisty as a sharecropper's daughter ought to be. You carry a chip on your shoulder and the knowledge of space-time travel in your mind, three degrees in six years from MIT, a thousand miles and memories away from Clinton, Georgia and here you are in space country like the Yoruban god, Shango, clenching the lightning bolts in your eager, steely fists; if only they had a colored bathroom in your building; gods should not have to walk a mile to pee. They are already suspicious of your power even though they are envious of your work ethic. Wondering where you go from here - you must be smart and retain your moral compass. Your boss tells you not to be a smart ass but you have melded with the IBM 7094 Computer which occupies half of the ground floor and is completely color blind. Tomorrow Night, on a secret cue, the cosmos will begin to turn in your direction. By using a mathematical series we are able to integrate any function with FORTRAN on the computer with all calculation being performed in milliseconds. Expanding in all directions, Big-Banging your universe until all the gears in your head will have meshed into photons of light, you and Shango will create the code to wrangle a rocket, break and saddle it, lead it around the O-ring until it obeys only your whistled commands, even though sometimes grabbing the bit in its teeth. You name your horse Saturn Five and he will carry three men to the moon, return them safely to earth, and finally, after many years of service, be sent out to stud in a pasture near Huntsville, Alabama. Eventually you and Shango loosen your grips on the thunderbolts. Your contributions will gradually sink into the memories of the company collective as you retire to the relative obscurity of Lake-of- the-Woods, Florida, located somewhere between the horse country of Ocala and the mouse country of Orlando. (First published in Veils - 2020)
