The Lights Go Out

The lights go out. We go outside, sit on the concrete patio, and eat melting ice cream. You ask, what if the power never came back on? What would that be like? We wouldn't have the news to criticize, we'd go to bed earlier, I say. Ice would be an expensive commodity, and everyone would get portable generators, you respond. The world would become little villages again, I think out loud. Superstition and the burning of witches, you say. Well, that could be, if for instance, for some reason, electrons no longer flow through the wires, I say. We look at the night sky in silence. Little superstitious villages -- and we'd have to do all our fucking laundry by hand, I realize. You exclaim, Shit! No! Like the show where they made that family live like Victorians! We sit and we wait. The power stays out. When the ice cream is inedible soup and my butt falls asleep, you grab a flashlight, and we visit the neighbors. We play a board game with them for several hours, by candlelight. We don't think about the future.