The lights have been out for two days. I’m sure that in other houses candles are burning and dusty attic-ed board games retrieved now that our electronics are dark. I’m sure that others expect that power will soon return, just like they mistakenly thought their money would reappear last month after the two largest banks’ coffers digitally went “poof.” I suspect these responses, but I don’t actually know what my neighbors are thinking because I’m on my own. No one has stopped by to check on me, but I haven’t checked on anyone else either.
I’m focused on food. The freezer food won’t last long. Anyway, I’ve been cooking hot dogs on the outdoor grill—I have been eating a lot of hot dogs—and thinking about “mouth feel.” Not taste so much as feeling. How do the burnt bits of charcoal feel on the roof of my mouth? I’d describe them as found stone in the forest where it doesn’t quite belong—course and unwelcome.
And that’s what worries me.
The other day, before the power went out, I found the remnants of an encampment less than a mile from my home. No one else would have noticed, but I recognized the stones that had been hastily moved and then replaced to hide the firepit that had kept these intruders warm. The softened earth was too cleared of last autumn’s leaves. Wildness tidied.
Someone is out there, slowly creeping toward us all—a frontline that knows we’re our own worst enemies. They know we’re weakest without our technology—our social skills long ago obliterated. They know that we’ll stay inside instead of finding new connections. They know that we’re more likely to turn on each other. They know that all they have to do is turn out the lights.
Abby Manzella is the author of Migrating Fictions: Gender, Race, and Citizenship in U.S. Internal Displacements, winner of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Book Award. She has published with journals such as Threepenny Review, MoonPark Review, HAD, Flash Frog, and Massachusetts Review. Find her on Twitter @abbymanzella.
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