It was Jody who noticed the light first.
We hadn’t had power for weeks by then; my mom, like everyone else, was running a little generator just to keep a minifridge cold with milk and lunch meat and stuff. The neighborhood smelled like gasoline all the time except at night, when it smelled like smoke from campfires. My mom had taken a bunch of bricks from a deserted construction site on the next block and put them in a big circle on the grass next to our house to make a firepit. The first week, it had been fun to sit around it at night and roast hot dogs with the other kids, but eventually we got really sick of hot dogs. Now she and the other moms put big heavy pots on piles of bricks in the middle of the fires and cooked stuff like noodles and rice and beans, but it took forever.
The night Jody found the light, I was so sick of campfire smoke that I’d convinced Mom we could walk by ourselves to the laundromat to get the stuff she’d dropped off earlier that week. The laundromat didn’t have power either, but there were people in the next few towns who had power who were helping folks in our town by doing our laundry for us. That was the pickup spot.
We took the green wagon; Mom hadn’t charged her car before the storm and now it was dead. The power company had removed all the live lines and pushed the downed poles to the side of the road, so it wasn’t too hard to get around the mess. Outside the laundromat, every car was running, with long cords coming out the windows to charge people’s phones.
I gave our name to the lady at the door, and she handed Jody and I our bags of clean clothes. Each bag had a box of granola bars and a jug of bottled water in it, so I was glad we had the wagon. The lady asked me if I needed any summer reading books for school in a few weeks, but I said no, I’d finished the freshman-year reading already. Jody took a couple of worn graphic novels. We were about to head back to our neighborhood when Jody stopped me.
“Look,” she said, pointing behind the laundromat.
I don’t know how she spotted it. It was just this one, tiny light on the back of a fence in the alley. We dragged the wagon behind us until we were right underneath it.
“It’s a string light,” I said, finally. It had to be seven feet in the air. When we squinted, we could see through the fence that there was a whole cord of them. This one, an edison-bulb-style, was looped over one picket, probably holding up the rest of the cord.
“How…why’s it working?” Jody asked.
It was 10pm, too late to be solar lights. We had those and they usually only stayed on a couple of hours because the skies were so grey. We both put our ears to the fence and listened. Sure enough, you could hear a powerful generator, maybe two, maybe three. There was a hum, now that we knew what to listen for – natural-gas-powered, not gasoline, probably built-in.
Jody and I followed the fence all the way around to a tall wrought-iron gate, padlocked from inside. It surrounded one of the houses in the fancy neighborhood that had emptied out before the storm, some people in their huge SUVs and a few in a series of helicopters that landed in the field in front of the country club. We hadn’t realized there were people left in there, but when we squinted at the windows, all covered with blackout-shades, we could see a few that might have had slivers of light.
“People are in there,” Jody said.
“Probably watching tv,” I added.
“And eating microwave popcorn.”
“And wearing hoodies. From the air conditioning.”
We stood there for a while, watching, then we followed the fence back around to the alley and stood under the light.
The next night, we brought a stool and duct-taped a lampshade to the bulb to throw the light further, and we set up a circle of camp chairs. For another dozen nights after that, all the older neighborhood kids came back with us.
We called it Lamp Time.
We got ice pops or PB&Js or bags of chips from the coolers at the laundromat and made “dinner parties” under the light. We played cards. One night, each of us shared the plot of our favorite tv episode. Someone had a book of weird questions to ask each other, and we argued, laughing, away from the parents and the campfires and the gas generators, stinking and cranky and covered in bug bites, and it was the only good part of my day that whole month.
When the power came back, I’d still sometimes walk back to that alley and look at the light, but one day, it was gone. I looked, and the front of the house had a big “SOLD” sign in front and a moving truck that was still being unloaded. I never knew who they were, the folks who’d given us Lamp Time, but fuck them for that one measly shared light, and also, thank whoever for it. Jody, mostly.
THIS COULD HAPPEN is a collection of speculative short stories based on the news, which itself these days scarcely seems believable. And yet here we are.
Want to read more stories about climate change?
Introduction to Catastrophe Modeling
“But I don’t understand,” Chris leaned forward in his seat, his palms up on the desk. “Graduation is next weekend. I already got my cap and gown, bro!”