Ball lightning recurs throughout the novel’s apocalyptic landscape, linking cosmic catastrophe to intimate memory. When Don first sees the floating, sizzling spheres moving through the forest, his mind goes back to a childhood plasma ball Jeremy once begged for at the mall, a toy that briefly delighted him before he threw it against a wall during one of his rages. The phenomenon brings together two kinds of unpredictable force: the planetary chaos consuming the Earth and the neurochemical disorder that shaped Jeremy’s life. Both are beautiful, both are uncontrollable, and both leave loving witnesses helpless.

Don compares Jeremy’s diagnosis to the gravitational catastrophe approaching Earth: A force that pulled inward until nothing else survived, and one no parental effort could counter. He observes that “some people have black holes in them. They try and escape, they try and break free, but it’s too strong. Burns up everything until there’s nothing left but ash” (78). The novel’s pervasive plasma imagery, from the bonfire weddings of Pantomime’s caravan to the fiery sky over the Cascades, extends this metaphor to the novel’s title: humans, like Jeremy, burn brightly and briefly. When Don and Rodney encounter the ball lightning near the watchtower, Rodney observes that Jeremy “would have loved this. All of it. It would’ve set his imagination on fire” (107). That small reframing, beauty rather than threat, reflects Don and Rodney’s growing ability to choose, even in the face of devastation, to receive the world as a gift rather than a threat. It allows Don to hold the memory of Jeremy alongside the memory of his rages and violence without turning away from either.