just words

When the power goes out, all the children come out to play, and the world as we know it comes to an end.

The other day, there was this big electrical storm. The sun was setting, and there were these huge gray clouds in the sky, flickering purple and blue every so often, and everything was sickly yellow and weird, and there was no rain whatsoever, just a faint chill and an otherworldly whistle on the wind.

I was sitting on my couch, watching Little Bear with my son, when suddenly there was this loud crack and everything went dark and quiet. “What happen? Where Little Bear?” So I got up, fetched the battery-powered lanterns, then hung them in key spots around the house, which created this little maze of soft white light, little patches of darkness all over the place, making certain parts of the home effectively off-limits and spooky. Then I pulled out some blocks and started building stuff, hoping to keep my son distracted, but he kept saying, “Where Little Bear? Where Little Bear?” and I kept responding, “The power’s out, the power’s out, just give it a few minutes, just give it a few minutes.”

But a few minutes turned into an hour, and my son grew restless, so he walked to the front door and kept saying, “Outside, outside,” so I figured what the hell, fetched a lantern, and we went outside, into the darkness of suburbia, the flickering purple and blue, and I started thinking to myself, damn, there’s more electricity up there in the clouds than down here on my block, and then I noticed just how surreal a suburb can seem when all the streetlamps are dead and all the windows have lost their shine. It was spooky almost, but it was also kinda exciting, in a way. I had grown so used to seeing the world through artificial light that, when it disappeared, it felt like I was in an entirely new world, uncharted territory, a world without screens and beams and weird invisible waves, totally free from the clutches of major utility providers, and the stars, in the break of the clouds, my god, the stars.

From the moment I stepped outside, it was as if I had some sort of high-powered cochlear implant, I could hear far-off chatter and distant laughter as if it were happening right next to me, and as my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see little shadows moving in the distance, some with little lights trailing behind them, creating afterimages of a surreal and beautiful nature, which turned out to be children playing in the roads, themselves surrounded by all sorts of people, hanging out, drinking, talking to each other by the mailboxes, just riding out the power outage. One dude way down the block even started shooting off fireworks, leftovers from July 4th, and each boom lit up the whole neighborhood like a Christmas tree, which excited my son to no end, so we ventured down the street some, toward the epicenter of the explosions, and that’s when we came across a large group of people all congregated around this one hairy shirtless dude shooting off fireworks, and then my son found some kids to play with, so he started running around like a madman, cheering and laughing, just having a blast, while literal blasts were going off, periodically lighting up his huge smile with every color of the rainbow, and I could hear all the people around me, no malice in their hearts, talking about their day and what they had made for dinner that night and what they had been doing just minutes before the outage, and there I was, just standing there, gunpowder wafting through my nostrils, looking around, kinda dumbfounded, thinking to myself,

Where the fuck did all these people come from?