©Corinne Landis, MSIV
“The power is out, the power is out!” Arthur repeats this phrase to himself as he scurries into the basement towards the circuit breakers. “I can do this,” he tells himself. Arthur swings open the aluminum door and stares at the rows of red switches. “Just flip the right combination, and it’ll bring power back to the house.” Arthur’s confidence barely abates as he switches the breakers at random with the hope of finding the right combination.
“Arthur, Arthur!” June yells as she comes down the stairs with Carol. June approaches Arthur, standing behind him as he plays with the switches. Her tired body creaks with anxiety as she thought about the effects of the recent storm. “What are you doing Arthur? The power is out on the whole block. Stop playing with that thing!”
Arthur slowly turns around to face her. He leans on a nearby chair for support looking disheveled. Remnants of his breakfast stain his white Oxford. His determined blue eyes meet hers. “I have fixed this before and I will fix it again—we will have power in no time!”
“Just leave him be. We need to figure out what we are going to do with this freezer anyway,” Carol mutters as she gently touches June’s shoulder. Carol guides June around the corner to the closet with the freezer. Arthur shuffles behind them reaching out his arm in attempt to catch their attention.
He watches Carol and June as they begin to empty the freezer. “Why are you doing that? That food needs to stay frozen.” Carol rolls her eyes. “Arthur, why don’t you go and find us a flashlight,” she says while holding a flashlight in her hand.
Up for a new task, and forgetting his circuit breaker conundrum, Arthur heads upstairs to carry out Carol’s order. He flips the kitchen light switch up and down several times, but, to his dismay, it yields no light. Once in the kitchen, he looks around confused as to why the lights are not working.
Forgetting why he came upstairs in the first place, he begins to head back down to the basement to check out the circuit breaker. “We must have blown a fuse,” he thinks to himself. Confidently, he saunters over to the fuse box passing June and Carol stacking frozen food on the floor, and he begins to move the circuit breakers back and forth. Nothing happens.
“June, I think the power is out. We need to call the electrician.” June and Carol, still huddled in the small closet housing the freezer, continue to reorganize the thawing food. Frustrated, June tries to keep her voice level, “Arthur, the storm knocked out the power on the whole block. There isn’t anything we can do about it right now.” She turns her attention back to the freezer, helping Carol determine which items absolutely need to remain frozen.
Arthur walks over to where the ladies are working. “I’ll go get some batteries to fix the freezer. That should do the job. You should stop pulling the food out,” Arthur explains. Feeling pleased with his observation, he heads upstairs to get the batteries.
Returning to the basement with batteries in tow, Arthur squeezes past the ladies to look for where he can put them in the freezer. “What are you doing?” Carol exclaims, “You cannot run a freezer with batteries.” Brushing off the statement, Arthur recognizes he knows something that Carol does not.
“Yes you can; I just need to find the place that you can put them. Why are you still pulling out the food? I can fix this.”
Carol and June make eye contact. Without saying a word, Carol takes the batteries from Arthur and slips them into her pocket. June and Carol resume their effort to save the frozen perishables. “Maybe we need more batteries,” Arthur thinks to himself as he heads upstairs. When he reaches the kitchen, he attempts to flip the lights on. After a few tries, he discovers that the power is out. “I should go and check the circuit breakers,” he thinks to himself.
Judge’s Comments:
This work of short fiction appears at first to explore how various characters respond to a power outage in a home setting. The storm in paragraph two likewise seems quite literal. Arthur attempts to fix the blackout and insists it’s a solvable problem he has figured out in the past. Yet, an uneasy undertone nestles within the dialogue of Carol and June, as they suggest more alarm at Arthur’s deteriorating logic in his frenetic response to restore power to the house. What initially strikes the reader as innocuous and absurd about Arthur begins to feel unsettled and tragic. The narrative begs the questions: What is really the problem? What has become of Arthur’s ability to grapple with real-world problems as he seems to deteriorate? The circular pattern of the story leaves the reader to wonder uneasily about these questions, even as the apparent nightmare continues without resolution.