About midnight last night the thunder rolled in from the northwest. It began as a faint growl, easily mistakeable for feet on the stairs, but as the first blue-white flickers began to light up the sky it grew into the crackling crescendo one associates with dark and stormy night movies. Enormous bolts descended from the sky, across which the cloud cover was scudding as if blown by a giant pair of lungs. The rifle-fire spattering and deep, echoing rumbles, with the occasional percussive clap, continued for half an hour and faded away into the west as quickly as it had come, leaving the colors of the ozone behind my eyelids.