The power went out at 6:42 p.m. on Christmas night, right when the casserole was starting to smell like something I could pretend resembled a celebration. The oven went silent mid-hum.
The kitchen light blinked once and died. The small Christmas tree in the corner stopped twinkling mid-sequence, as if it had simply gotten tired of trying to be cheerful in a house that had forgotten how. My son Owen, four years old and built like a sturdy little fire hydrant in dinosaur pajamas, took it personally.
“Daddy,” he said, his voice wobbling with that particular note of betrayal only children can master, “the tree stopped.”
“I know, buddy,” I told him, setting down the oven mitt I’d been holding. “It’s not mad at us. It’s just taking a nap.”
He’d been clutching a candy cane I’d grabbed at the grocery store checkout last week—a small peace offering to December, to the holidays, to the universe that kept demanding I celebrate when all I wanted was to survive.
The candy cane slid from his small fist and thumped against the hardwood floor. He stared at it like betrayal had taken physical form. In the living room, the baby monitor still glowed on battery power, casting a faint blue light.
My daughter Daisy was asleep in what we used to call “the guest room” before life taught us to stop planning ahead. She was nine months old and had a way of sleeping like she’d never been disappointed by anyone, which made exactly one of us in this house who could claim that. I stood there for a moment, listening to the new kind of quiet that settles over a house when the electricity stops.
When the heat shuts off in winter, a place doesn’t go cold all at once. First it just becomes less friendly. Then it starts remembering every draft it ever had, every gap in the insulation, every window that doesn’t quite seal properly.
The wind rattled the porch railing outside with increasing insistence. Somewhere down the road, a tree branch snapped with a sound like a gunshot, and then the whole night settled back into its steady, indifferent hum of wind through bare branches and snow against glass. “Okay,” I said, more to myself than to Owen.
“Plan B.”
Plan B was what my entire life ran on now. Plan A had died in a hospital room three years ago with my wife’s hand going cold in mine, my jacket smelling like antiseptic and the cheap coffee from the vending machine I’d been living on for weeks. Plan A had contained a whole future—anniversaries and family vacations and watching our kids grow up together.
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