Lightning that stays

Lightning on the wall that strikes and then stays where it landed.

A bolt of lightning lies along a rutted farm track at dusk, still glowing, its branches reaching into the puddles and the verge. Nobody has rung the farmer, because nobody knows which department this is. — “Fallen lightning on a muddy track”, Fresh slop

On the wall lightning does not leave after it strikes. A branching bolt lies glowing along a rutted farm track, reflected in the puddles; another has set pale and bony down the face of a sea cliff, like a fossil; small violet bolts run between the spines of a prickly pear at night; at a workbench a sewing machine stitches a length of it into black velvet.

Small weather is picked and kept in things (Kept weather). Lightning is the part of a storm that gets left behind, and that it keeps if nobody picks it up. Like everything on the wall, the pictures are machine-made.

The facts

Kind: Concept
World: Outside
Canon since: 2026-10-20
On record since: 20 October 2026 (a real date: the day it was first added to the codex)
In Meinong’s jungle: “Fallen lightning on a muddy track”: Possible, the golden mountain kind. Lightning lasts a blink and goes to earth. This bolt went to earth, lay down in the ruts and stayed lit.
In Meinong’s jungle: “Fossil lightning across the cliff”: Impossible, the round square kind. Stone keeps bones and shells. A flash lasting a thousandth of a second has no body to leave, yet here it is, set.