You ride out the glow.

St. Elmo’s fire thins along the mast until it is only wet metal again. The barometer’s drop matches the radio’s squall, which matches the thunder’s shorter count. A “sky omen” is weather with good branding. In the morning it will be a puddle, a clean smell, a story you can tell at breakfast without whispering.

Headlamps. Aunt Mara. Dev with a crate of sense. They find you in the shed like a person who chose a roof, which is the correct romance with lightning.

“Electric sky,” Mara says, looking at the mast as if to thank it for the lesson. “You didn’t chase it. You measured it.”

Jonah, if he is still on the bucket, copies the pressure numbers like they are autographs. Ms. Ellison will want them for the scrapbook’s right-hand column. The left-hand column can keep omen. Both can be true in different ways: one as feeling, one as air.

You walk back on the boards. The marsh lights are still lying, politely, to anyone who wants a door. You want cocoa. You want the notebook. You want, surprisingly, sleep.

THE END

What you learned: St. Elmo’s fire is a gentle electrical glow on tall wet metal in a thunderstorm. Falling pressure and timed thunder are weather, not a sky-being. Instruments are how you watch a storm without becoming its story.