This Morning I Almost Stepped on a Fulgurite

while pacing the beach out step by step.
It was under the ghost of a thunderstorm moving north,
formed when lightning bit into the shore
and melted the sand there, leaving a glass casing
like a tiny slipper.
 
The slivers of rock around it looked young and angry,
but I bent and picked it up. Somewhere close,
the remnants of this storm hung over another beach
and I saw the flash that meant lightning somewhere nearby,
startling me,
turning, for one moment,
all the cells in my body into trembling glass.