Blackout

The grid exhaled and the whole street forgot its name. Refrigerators fell silent mid-sentence, and the dark came in like water through a cracked hull, patient, level, touching everything at once.

We found the candles we keep for nothing, their small flames leaning toward each breath, and the rooms grew strange and close, furniture surfacing like islands from a sea we had stopped seeing.

Outside, the avenues had given up their glow. A neighbor laughed somewhere, surprised by his own voice. The traffic lights hung blind above the crossings, and for once the cars agreed to wait.

Then someone said look up, and we did— the sky had been there all along, unbilled, a spillage of old light no switch could reach, the city's roof dissolved into pinholes through which some larger room was shining.

When the power returned it arrived as theft: the screens, the hum, the orange wash of the lamps folding the stars back into rumor. We blinked, restored to our small electric lives, and did not say how briefly we had been enormous.