Interesting what pops up, when the grid goes dark. What did they do at Stonehenge?

IN THE DARK

Carol sits in front of her computer screen checking her emails, part of her morning ritual. There’s one from her brother, there’s her daily horoscope (silly things but she reads them everyday – sometimes they make her laugh). Spam show up even though she has a filter. Ads for LL Bean, Ugg Australia, Amazon, places she’s bought something from trying to tempt her into buying more.

Delete, delete. The NY Times she keeps. She’ll scan it later for articles that interest her. She clicks on her bother’s name, leans back in her chair waiting for it to open, and suddenly the screen goes black. She jiggles the mouse, com’on, damnit. Did she hit the wrong key again? Then she notices the silence.

It takes her a minute to realize what is missing, that annoying whirr of the cheap ceiling fan over her desk. She looks up and sees the four blades frozen in mid rotation. The end of each blade curves gently down as if apologizing for their failure to spin. Reaching out to her desk lamp, she hits the switch, on, off, on, off – nothing. Must have blown a circuit breaker. She’ll have to go down into the basement to check which one.

When she walks down the hall to the top of the stairs she hears more silence. The AC duct isn’t wheezing around the filter. She reaches out and flips on the light switch at the top of the stairs and laughs. The powers off, you dummy. Carol glances into her bathroom. Built into the center of the house, with no windows, it’s always night in there. The stark white tub and toilet glow a bit.
She gets to the bottom of the stairs opens the basement door and reaches in to switch on the light. Funny how her hands and arms keep repeating the same automatic motions even though her brain knows it’s fruitless.

The basement is so dark, not one window, she’s always hated it, reminds her of an Edger Allan Poe pit. She’s forgotten the flashlight. Looking up to the top of the stairs, she thinks, there’s one on top of the oak bookcase in her office. Then she remembers a flashlight she left on the dresser down here last month, when she’d had to turn off the power to replace a burnt out plug. The red handled screwdriver and the pliers are probably still right next to it. She’s gotten lax about putting things away.

Carol stands in the doorway for a minute envisioning the exact placement of the dresser on the far wall across the huge room, must be fifty feet away. But she really doesn’t want to go up and down the stairs again. Taking a deep breath she strides out into the room, forgetting how quickly the basement door will slam shut by itself. It sounds like a tomb. God, she really has to get Poe out of her head.

She’s halfway across the room now, knowing this because she’s just slammed her thigh into the big oval table. She feels her way along the edge of it, gasping. Okay, here’s the last chair. Carol sticks her arms straight out in front of her and lurches towards the dresser. Her arms hit the wall before her right foot bangs painfully into the dresser. Standing there in the dark, she clutches the top of it almost sobbing. More deep breaths and then she can grope for the flashlight.

She switches it on, pitifully grateful for the faint light, and here’s the screwdriver and pliers right where she’d left them. Yanking open the metal breaker box, she checks every breaker and they’re all fine, so it must be a power outage. Closing the metal door harder than necessary, she walks across the room to the door.

Leaning her hip firmly into the door handle, Carol flicks off the light and allows herself a moment to remember why she hates the dark.

Five years old and locked in a closet by the babysitter for being a Bad Girl. A fifteen minute time-out that had turned into hours before her parents came home and found the babysitter in their bed with her boyfriend and Carol terrorized in the closet. She’d peed her pants but hadn’t screamed. Good girls didn’t scream.

With the door handle still anchoring her; she lets her self scream now. It was the only good thing for her about the basement. She could scream all she wanted to and nobody could hear her. Maybe one day her five year old would be all screamed out.

Then she opened the basement door and climbed the stairs up into the light to call the power company.