Nonfiction by Katelyn Weeks
Summer evenings in Western Massachusetts are punctuated by strikes of lightning—or, more precisely, threats of them. We spend hours indoors while it pours, flashes, and shakes.
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I wrangle a group of twenty first graders into a line for a showing of “Electricity Theater”. At science camp, we are running late, as we often do. There are water bottles to grab and places in line to fight over, and I am the only adult in the room. After multiple reminders to stay on the right side of the stairs, my young scientists and I make it up to the third floor, to the home of the museum’s Faraday cage and musical Tesla Coils. These particular first graders are either brave, or have already seen the show before this summer, because for once, no one chooses to sit out. Making sure each child grabs a pair of headphones, we enter the theater together and find our way to our faux red velvet seats.
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Though we are adults, adults older than us suggest the flashing and shaking has something to do with our elevation, our rural location. I think it is the way campus dips southward, the way mountains frame the background of my pictures like curtains.
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It begins with an idea. The operators of “Electricity Theater” question my first graders: “What do you know about electricity? How is it made? Where does it go? What does it do?” The six-year-olds respond in variations of it makes things go.
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I meet Nora, a fellow aspiring teacher, during my first summer in Western Massachusetts. We find ourselves in Western Massachusetts as part of a summer program and across the room, Nora appears completely ordinary, as if a stock photo image of a woman. When she introduces herself, she says she has been waiting all year for this summer. We are in a chorus room without choral sounds, just Nora’s voice, filling. She is received by expectant, waiting ears.
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In December of 1835, Michael Faraday attempted to map the intensity of electricity onto a surface. He borrowed a large copper boiler, 31 inches wide in diameter. By the end of December, Faraday had determined a boiler wouldn’t do. Instead, he needed to build a box.
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Nora notices me like she notices things. I fail to notice her noticing until she brings her notices to the attention of others who bring her noticing to the attention of me.
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Beyond the origin is the story of how something so unruly came to be contained. The adults in the theater continue, “In 1836, Michael Faraday made a discovery. Have you ever made a discovery before?” Small hands in the museum shoot up. “Faraday discovered a way to keep electricity outside, out! He built what we call a Faraday cage.”
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It was Chloe who first suggested it—the chance between Nora and me. It was the middle of July, and we were chaperoning the Midsummer Dance. Heat seeped out of the student center and onto the patio, where Chloe and I patrolled snack consumption. Chloe inquired, looking at me the way I imagine our middle school students were looking at each other inside the student center, trying to determine their best friend’s secret crush.
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During the second week of year 1836, Michael Faraday experimented. While all his previous experiments had been conducted at home, Faraday decided this experience needed to be staged. Inside the Royal Institution’s lecture theatre, Faraday constructed a 12-foot-tall wooden structure, collaged in wire and paper, mounted on four glass feet. With a candle in one hand and an electrometer in the other, Faraday stepped inside the cage.
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I assumed, by default, that it was because of sexuality, our common interest, that Nora showed up later that night.
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From his time up on stage, from his time in the cage, Faraday determined that electrical charge was dependent on the electrical state of the observer. Faraday determined that electricity was precise—it was a force, rather than an imponderable fluid, as previously thought.
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The first day Nora and I visit the pond, my car careens across the gravel parking lot. As soon as we leave my car, we walk into the woods in search of the pond at its center, inside its heart. My sandals have just barely left gravel when she looks over at me, her voice quavering, mimicking the crunching and careening of my hatchback into the parking lot gravel, of our sandals stomping down branches, embedded in the dirt below. “Is this a date?”
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“A Faraday cage,” the operators at the museum explain, “is made of metal.” Pointing to the tall cage on stage they say, “This is a Faraday cage. See the metal wiring? It keeps electricity on the outside, so that the inside of the cage stays perfectly free of electric charge. It is so safe that even a human could step inside it!”
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At night, Nora and I go on walks. We can easily see the stars, but I hadn’t remembered them being important, just another element of nighttime. Down the long path of Stonecutter Road, we walk until we think it improbable that the road continues, the dark too foreboding. A wonderful place to fall in love, really.
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The operators ask my first graders, “Where, do you think, is the safest place during a thunderstorm? Did you know that your car is a Faraday cage? Your car’s metal frame protects you during a thunderstorm. It keeps the electricity out.”
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We walk at night because the dark provides anonymity. Nora and I remain anonymous to passersby, only illuminated by headlights of the occasional golf cart or passing car. On our walks, we don’t look at each other. Instead, our intimacy is metonymic—built out of contiguity, an associative proximity, or the way our hands and our bodies swing in tandem as we walk.
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A century before Faraday, the conductivity of the human body was used for show.
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In the dark, Nora tells me that she needs to tell me something. Nora tells me that kissing makes her throw up. The thoughts preceding the act of kissing and the thoughts past the act of kissing make her nauseous. The first time she kissed someone, she wanted to throw up. She tried thinking about kissing again, but that made her nauseous again. That was two years ago. When she tells me all this, she is still holding my hand, so I imagine her nausea, her fear, as a kind of seasickness—a conditional, passing phase.
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At the museum, the operators emphasize safety. These operators ensure my group of first graders that they are entirely safe in the audience. With the theater lights still on, the operators point to the wire casing enclosing the stage. “See?” they explain. “The stage itself is a Faraday cage.”
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Nora does not break contact. With our hands intertwined, my fingertips stretch past her knuckles, and Nora tells me that this is going well. She likes this, and we are not like her past. She does not fear the thought of us together, and I feel reciprocity burn through me, a hole in my shirt, a fire started by a child with only a magnifying glass and a dry leaf. Nora looks at me with such certainty that I let myself want.
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In private homes, in lecture halls, for scientific societies, English physicist Stephen Gray performed the “flying boy experiment.” A young boy wrapped in silk clothes would be suspended from the ceiling, his feet resting on a hidden conductor. With a book out in front of him, the boy could turn the pages without touching them, with only a single hand outstretched.
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After Gray, it was women who held the electrical soirées of the late eighteenth century, filling their homes, drawing rooms, and salons with scientific curiosity. The women, the men, the people of the drawing room were curious with biological sex—the idea that the “electrical fire” within men and women’s bodies traveled differently. We derive the contemporary notion of “romantic spark” from this “traveling fire” in bodies, yet there is nothing romantic about bodies as conductors, bodies as performance pieces, bodies as experiments.
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Date, as a verb means to make a usually romantic social arrangement with, meet, have a date with, yet we use it more often to label intimacy. If you adhere to this first definition, Nora and I were dating. We started dating the second we jumped off the rock and shared the space of the pond, when our arms occupied space and mimicked the motion of treading water even though we could touch the rocks below. We started dating when Nora told me she was scared, and I promised I understood what that meant.
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Electrifying Venus was one of the most famous drawing room experiments developed by German professor George Matthias Bose. On an insulated stool, a lady would sit while operators charged her body with an electric machine. Once charged, gentlemen in the audience would be invited to kiss the lady. When their lips floated too close to hers, they would receive a spark, to the delight of both the lady and her audience.
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A Faraday cage is an instrument at the museum. By instrument, I mean musical. When the lights go down, the opening notes of the Star Wars theme song reverberate through the theater. Strokes of white lightning rattle the cage, each note hitting the cage at a different angle, accounting for tonal shifts.
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Of the experiments, Bose wrote, “Could one believe that a lady’s finger, that her whalebone petticoat, should send forth flashes of true lightning, and that such charming lips could set on fire a house?”
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Once before the summer ends, Nora and I go to the movies. The theater is old and classic with faux red velvet seats. We arrive after dinner and make our way to the theater’s left side. We are right next to each other, and despite our physical proximity, I imagine the aisles of the theater filling the small gap between our seats. Nora is seated to my right, and my hand hovers, hesitant and patient. I wait for potential reciprocity, and she reaches for my hand.
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Before the first song ends, I sense movement on the left side of the theater. A child-sized figure stands up, making their way to a teacher-sized figure a row ahead of me. I see movements of exchange, a nod of agreement. The teacher looks in my direction, and I give a wave of approval before she steps outside with the child. I glance over at her six-year-olds, sitting on their hands, doe-eyed and still. The stage is still laden with charge, and these children are enraptured by its threat.
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During a Western Massachusetts summer, I know the safest place to be is inside a car.
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When the first song ends, the operators encourage the adults in the room to step inside the cage. My first graders look expectantly in my direction.
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In medicine, an electric shock is used to restart the heart.
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I’ll tell you now that I took her to my car because it was raining in Western Massachusetts. I’ll tell you I took her to my car because I knew how to keep us safe. But in truth, I knew where to place my hands. In truth, I took her to my car because I wanted to feel her skin, her palm, her knuckles beneath mine. I wanted our bodies, contiguous and contained. I took her to my car because it was raining in Western Massachusetts, a precursor to all things static, all things ending, and all the ice cream shops in a 30-mile radius were closed because of summer’s approaching end.
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And yet, I still wanted more of her, as much of her as I could hold.
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In 1839, Michael Faraday suffered a “nervous breakdown.”
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Following the lead of my six-year-olds’ expectant eyes, I step inside the metal box. The lights go down, and white-hot, artificial lightning strikes the cage. With each flash, the cage vibrates—it is quivering, moving alongside the score, within the notes.
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The rain continues with Nora and I safe inside my car. Though we had traveled together before in my car, our bodies had never been contained like this—in wait, in lurch, in potential. Through my windshield, Western Massachusetts is a shifting haze of gray. With her in my passenger seat, I hadn’t bothered to turn on the ignition, and as we talk, I imagine the air of my car as one entity—recycled and shared between our mouths. I feel her body shift and can tell she had been trying not to think of it, and I hadn’t thought of it—the connotation of our shared breath fogging up my car windows.
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Inside the cage, I am, as promised, safe. The song is still playing, and I raise my hand to the edge of the cage. My hand hesitates. It is suspended in mid-air at the corner, inches away from the white-hot strike. My flesh is parallel to charge, yet my body remains entirely unaffected. The hair on my arm lies entirely still, even as my fingertip grazes the metal corner and the metal mesh wiring of the cage.
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I had looked past this, the thought of us together inside my car, the finger drawings of previous passengers now visible on my rear windows—our arms lying inches apart only separated by my emergency break, the black console between our seats. It was raining in Western Massachusetts, and inside this car, inside my car, I thought nothing would be safer.
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I know bodies are conductors, have electrical currents, nerve endings, synapses, and gaps, yet when I think about electricity and currents between bodies, the current is made of water. I am six years old, floating on my back with my ears submerged. I receive sounds as if filtered through a large tunnel. When I float, I am headed to a place I cannot see, guided by current, by only the buoyant charge of my body.
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In 1951, John Cage visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. Built for Naval testing and said to be the “quietest room of the continent,” Cage expected to hear nothing inside the chamber. Instead, he heard two sounds: one high-, and another low-pitched. After exiting the chamber, Cage questioned the engineer about what he’d heard. The engineer replied that the sharp electrical hum was Cage’s nervous system, while the low sound was his heart, the moving of blood through his circulatory system.
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Gray surrounds us, and seeps through the windows of my silver hatchback, and I want to believe that I don’t want it, don’t want the intimacy associated with a fogged windowpane. I want to believe I don’t want it here, with her, in this parking lot—my transparent windows steamed gray, gray, gray. In the driver’s seat, I sit bare and exposed, unable to disguise my wanting, unable to morph my thoughts into anything else. My yellow raincoat begins to chafe against my shifting thighs, and I am scared of my impulse, scared of the imprints of past passengers, of the drawings on my rear windows. I am ashamed that I thought I didn’t want it, ashamed to have not been honest, and ashamed to want it still, more, another layer, an opening.
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In 1905, Albert Einstein advanced work on electromagnetism with his theory of special relativity. It was previously thought that the laws of classical mechanics did not apply to electricity. With his theory of special relativity, Einstein sought out to prove that the same laws apply universally to all inertial observers, even in the case of electricity.
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When I look up, Nora is looking at me. My hands shift at my sides, and I want to salvage this moment, to keep her in my passenger seat, yet her mouth is downturned, her face contorted with worry. I sense something in her face that I can no longer sway, can no longer remedy. I look down at her hands, her skin familiar to me. I scan her skin—her fingers, her hands, her arms, and settle on her wrists, her wrists like summer, her wrists and her purple beaded bracelet that says her name, her purple beaded bracelet made by me.
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With traces of me on her skin, I feel intertwined with Nora in this moment, yet I don’t reach across the console. Though I know where to place my hands, I don’t grab her hand because I don’t believe I can keep her. I don’t believe I can save her, protect her from thoughts inside and outside my car. I don’t grab her hand because I want love, this, me, to be safe for her. When I look up, Nora looks more than seasick, and I don’t reach for her because I want her to feel safe wanting me, and I want her to want me too, despite it all.
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In 1930, years after Gray and Faraday, Dr. William Kouwenhoven invented the defibrillator—the first external jump start of the human heart.
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Nora exits my car.
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When Nora exits, so do I. Reaching for the door handle, I stand up and outside my car. By now, the rain has stopped, yet the air of Western Massachusetts is still thick, heavy with the potentiality of rain. Across the still wet, silver hood of my hatchback, I see Nora’s purple clad raincoated figure double over. Her body is bent, a halfway fold, appearing as if she is hiding behind the hood of my car, yet in actuality, I know her to be doubled over in pain. In actuality, I know myself to be responsible for her pain, for the purple folding of her raincoated body.
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At the end of the song, the first graders clap. The operators clear the stage of any remaining charge, and I step across. As I walk back to my seat, my first graders are too enthused to remember we are in a theater, clambering for my attention, shouting my name.
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There are moments I am ashamed of my impulse.
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Einstein’s theory of special relativity accounts for our notion of simultaneity, depicted in his train-car thought experiment. An observer on a train platform and an observer standing on top of a moving train witnessed two instantaneous strikes of lightning. The strikes hit the train in two different places, once in the front, and once in the back.
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After Nora leaves my car, we stopped speaking. Before the summer ended and we all left Massachusetts, I sought some element of goodbye, for her eyes to meet mine, yet was shooed away into some backyard where more celebratory end-of-summer drinking was in order. Before I could escape the backyard, Nora’s silver two-door had already departed, climbing over the Connecticut River and out of the dark woods of Western Massachusetts.
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In 1845, Faraday returned to his studies on electromagnetism.
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In the train car experiment, only one of the two observers perceives the lightning strikes as simultaneous, despite their synchroneity. The difference is motion—the observer on the top of the car is hurtling towards the first strike, so its light reaches this observer’s eye first.
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I’m driving my car to New Hampshire. New Hampshire is contiguous to Massachusetts, and I try not to remember all that I am passing through, yet an image of Nora appears still, her bout of seasickness has washed over whatever was left, and despite the fact that I have never gotten carsick before, I get carsick. Doubled over, I throw up on the side of the road.
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It is fallacious—the idea that a car is the safest place to be during a thunderstorm. It is safer than outside, but a car is an imperfect model of a Faraday cage. A car is made with windows. It has holes. It is built with gaps.
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In the case of a lightning strike, in the case of rain, in the case of a state of flashing, pouring, and shaking, in the case of a flashing, pouring, and shaking all across the state of Massachusetts, in the case of a single strike, a white-hot moment of electricity headed groundward, two observers—given their positions, given one’s movement, given factors of perception—experience the same event, a single instance, differently.
Bertucci, Paola. “Sparks in the dark: the attraction of electricity in the eighteenth century.” Endeavour vol. 31,3 (2007): 88-93. doi:10.1016/j.endeavour.2007.06.002
Houton, Jacqueline. “Listening to Silence.” Harvard Divinity Bulletin,
bulletin.hds.harvard.edu/listening-to-silence/. Accessed 8 May 2025.
Katelyn Weeks is from Upstate New York and studied English and creative writing at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She now lives, writes, and teaches middle school English in Manchester, New Hampshire. She has previously served as an assistant editor for Seneca Review and as part of the editorial and acquisitions board for Seneca Review Books.
Arcturus 