No, this isn’t electric ray, the fish. Instead it’s a literally true, English-language representation of the Spanish word commonly used for a cloud-to-ground lightning stroke: rayo (ray). A single, non-forked lightning discharge—much resembling the stereotypical energy ray of science fiction—blasted past the edge of a supercell’s forward-flank core, with mesocyclone region mostly unseen off the left edge of the view. Staccato CGs like this, in the same area of the forward-flank/inflow interface, were so frequent that I decided to try capturing one with hand-held slide shooting, and it worked. The same mesocyclone of this cyclic, long-lived but nontornadic storm is on the right side of an earlier image here.
5 SSE Vernon TX (16 May 89) Looking NW
34.091, -99.27