“I don’t see what’s so funny.”
Jan laughed even harder and said, “That’s why it’s funny.” Her hands fumbled around the dining table, searching for her lighter. “Because you can’t see.”
“Neither can you,” Elliot lobbed back. He was imitating her fumbling around the dining table searching for her lighter, impotently miming his mockery into the darkness.
“And who’s fault is that, Elliot? Why can’t I see, Elliot?”
A crescent moon was sunk somewhere beyond the horizon but the stars were out. They danced along the treetops and traced the edges of the faraway mountains and disappeared behind thin trails of rolling clouds. The hue of bright sodium lamps occupied one distant quadrant of the night sky instead of swallowing it entirely, like it did back when they lived in the city.
A clear evening with a full moon would have lit up the kitchen. Hell, it might have been a little romantic. But a partially-occluded field of distant stars is next to useless when the power’s out.
“I already said,” Elliot finally answered. “It was probably that bang I told you about. Like a transformer—”
“A transformer blew up so you didn’t pay the power bill?”
“I paid it!”
Jan found the lighter. Each emphatic shhhick brought a shock to the kitchen.
For a brief moment, she saw Elliot’s eyes fixed exactly one million miles in front of him. He was looking somewhere beyond her and beyond the spark of her lighter and beyond this night’s particular set of arguments. His face was still; the falsely accused and the captured guilty all look the same when they reckon no one can see them.
Elliot snapped-to after the second roll of the igniter. He saw how the stale, saturated, hot air pulled Jan’s dress to her shoulders and breasts and how strands of hair were matted to her forehead and how those matted strands dangled over her sunken eyes. After a guilty glance, the flame went out and his eyes retreated into the darkness with everything else.
“Hey, hold that lit for a sec,” Elliot said as he stood. “Let me grab a candle.”
“I wanna go sit outside.”
“We’re still gonna need light in here.”
She drew a long sigh before she brought the flame back. Elliot shuffled into the kitchen, to the junk drawer, and stuck his hand inside before the room went dark. He pushed his way around plastic ballpoint pens and grocery store loyalty cards and dead batteries trying to find a single useful thing.
“You’re gonna need light in here,” Jan exclaimed, proudly. “I’m gonna go sleep over at Laurie’s tonight.”
Elliot stopped. The kitchen went as quiet as it was dark.
“Oh, don’t be stupid, Jan. It’s just one night.”
Jan turned away from the voice of unconvincing certainty and toward the window overlooking the backyard. Outside, she saw the stars all glimmering around the unmistakable black shadow of their neighbor’s strange A-frame roof. Their lights were out, too. In fact, as far as Jan could tell, all of their neighbors’ homes— back, side-to-side, and catty corner— were dark.
“It’s just one night,” Elliot repeated. “I paid the goddamn bill. Power company’ll be out in the mornin to turn it back on. Don’t be so dramatic.”
The cherry of Jan’s cigarette condensed around a knowing grin on her face. The darkness outside told her a funny little secret. She pushed the butt into her empty Coke can, then stood to move toward the front door. Her seat scraped against the linoleum.
“Just sit down,” Elliot pleaded from somewhere else, still rifling through the kitchen. “Let me find a candle and we can talk all this out!”
Jan didn’t say another word to him.
On her drive out of the neighborhood, she made one familiar right turn and was blinded by a dense explosion of pulses and beams. A thousand yellow emergency flashers filled the street with a discordant, unnatural, and, on this night, unfamiliar bright light. She moved her truck forward, cautiously.
A younger man in a high-vis jacket emerged from the whites and the golds and made the universal roll-down-your-window hand gesture.
“Ma’am, you’re gonna have to head back down toward 50. This road’s closed.” He turned and squinted back into the flashers, then added, “Or, uh, actually, just give us like five more minutes. Looks like we’re about wrapped up.”
“What happened?” Jan asked.
“Damndest thing,” the man replied, pulling back his plastic safety hat to wipe his brow. “Best we can guess is, it was a meteor.”
“Like, a shooting star?”
“Or whatever it’s called when it’s not in space. Meteorite? Tore a damn transmission pole in half.”
Jan glanced back toward home. The crook of the crescent moon was peeking beyond the mountains in the distance. There was plenty of light now, stars and all.