Overflash

On January 5, 2024, Jay Gerbrandt was driving home when a lightning strike passed through his car, locked his limbs, and sent him crashing into a parked Mustang on a dark Vancouver Island road.

What followed was thirteen months of medical dismissal, personal unraveling, and a growing suspicion that something had happened to him that nobody around him was willing to name. It wasn't until a flashback recovered a fading memory — a rash patterned like cedar fronds, spreading across his skin, gone before anyone could document it — that the pieces fell into place.

The rash was a Lichtenberg figure. Its presence is pathognomonic for electrical injury. It is also fleeting, which is kind of the whole problem.

Overflash is about that night, and the year that followed — told by someone who had to trust his own memory when every institution around him didn't.

Return — the opening excerpt — is available now on this site. It takes you through the night of the accident, the year of confusion, and the February morning when a nap changed everything.

Jay Gerbrandt is an entrepreneur and builder currently working on Fruitbloom (technology transfer) and Squirrel Ridge / (Indige)nymy (Indigenous place names). Before that: diagnostics, data, and a childhood spent in front of cameras. He lives in Canada.