When the power went out yesterday evening, it didn’t go in a bang like a lightning strike or a snapped pole.

No, it was slower than that, gentler.

I was in the basement, having just finished loading and starting the washer and dryer. The cycle was just winding up when the lights flickered slowly. My first thought was that there was a bird stuck in the basement, possibly a bat, fluttering past the bulb.

Then the light pulsed once, twice, and someting snagged like a cat’s claw in fabric, tugging the house into darkness.

Thirteen hours now, the power’s been off. The air in the hours is thick and stale with no fan to shove it about.

The two cats lie in little heaps, like freshly-killed pelts spread out to dry.

As of this writing, the battery on the laptop indicates that it has 91 hours of life left — which I take as a good sign that I’ve plenty of juice left to write this. No . . . it just flipped over and now reads 3:45. I dim the backlight as far as it will go, gently tease it back up one notch. Now I’ve got a respectable 5 hours or so to work with.

I’m glad I rationed it last night — which wasn’t too difficult, as there was no way to access the internet so what was the point, anyway?

Today, I’ve followed the example of cats, staying in bed as long as possible before getting up to make tea; the caffeine is necessary enough to endure theat of the stove, kettle, and mug.

I move slowly through the house, in the center of a me-shaped, warm mist.

Some Sunday afternoons, we have unannounced visitors stop by. I’m wearing boxershorts and a t-shirt promoting the atheletic department of a fictional, Lovecraftian university — caveat emptor.

The phone rings: Keeley at work, checking up on me and the cats and the power. I report that all three are resting peacefully. We (she and I, sans cats) are meant to be going out to the lake tonight for fireworks and family. But if the power’s still out, we agree, it’s best to stay and protect the homestead.

We’ll probably do what we did last night: Mourn for a while over how we can’t watch the new Deadwood tape her parents dropped off or the Japanese horror DVD’s we got from Netflix, or gently bitch about how we can’t surf the ‘Net . . . before eventually making drinks (quickly getting ice out of the freezer for her margarita and my whiskey) and settling down to play a game of Battleship (I won, by the way, but just barely) and then lighting candles.

“Tell me a ghost story,” she asked. So I did. It was about music and snow and what happens to us when the gods bump up against one another.

And then she gave me one, a terrific one about two shepherds and a scarecrow they make for company . . . and what happens when they don’t treat him well.

Then we just talked into the night, replacing the candles once or twice. We sat out on the porch swing and remembered how we met and talked about who said what first and when. And I wondered if we would always have this conversation in early July, year after year.

Somehow, we wandered out of that conversational neighborhood and into new locations, tossing story and plot points back and forth, fitting ideas together and trying to build something new between us.

We said hello to Ron, the landlord, who poppped over from next door to close some windows for the neighbor girls who were out of town and shouldn’t have left them open to begin with.

As he left, I realized that a casual observer might think us odd after overhearing our conversation about magic and evil princes. I assured him that we were planning a sequel to a cheesey 80’s fantasy movie but that it was all right because no one would ever want to make it. As if this explained it all, I mentioned that we’d started talking about comic books.

He nodded and made the sort of safe remark you make when it’s late and dark and some idiot tells you somthing you don’t understand or care about.

Then he left us in our dark, odd world to discuss how important Val Kilmer’s role should be and who would be best to cast as the princess.

Bryce Dallas Howard, we decide, before locking everything up and heading off to try and sleep.

Altogether, a very pleasant evening.

But . . . all night long, I dream slow warm dreams. And somewhere in the back corner of each of them, there’s a refigerator and freezer full of food slowly thawing, starting to rot…


This morning, I found the candle wax spread out and congealed like the colorful guts of the fiddler from my story the night before.

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[Later: The power just came back . . . but everything is dim around the edges. Outside, there are sirens everywhere.]