Rooftop Orchard During the Outage

When the grid went dark, the city exhaled, and every window became a quiet pond. Above the stairwell door, tomato vines held rain like small red lanterns no one had lit.

We climbed by phone-light, then switched it off. The sky arrived all at once, unfiltered, a deep well scattered with cold sparks, and the basil leaves gave back the day in scent.

Somewhere below, sirens stitched and unstitched the avenues. Up here, bees slept in the clover box, soil cooling around their hidden gold, while wind turned the laundry line into a low violin.

By midnight, even our voices had softened. We passed a pear from hand to hand, its pale flesh bright as a struck match, and ate as if learning the shape of light again.