Lights Out! Imagination On!

 By Thomas Kies

Isn’t that when your imagination runs wild?  In the dark?

On New Year’s Eve my wife and I met friends at one of our favorite restaurants on the mainland.  We had a relatively late seating for eight o’clock, but after dinner we thought we’d walk over to the harbor where we could watch the holiday fireworks.  

The stage was set for that evening when fog rolled in from the oceanside and then a steady drizzle fell.  Before we headed over the bridge, we’d heard the fireworks had been canceled due to the incoming inclement weather. 

Not to be deterred, we all convened at a cozy table in the dining room and started our evening with a round of drinks.  Taking our time, we enjoyed conversation, listened to the specials, and gave our server our orders.  Knowing that the dark gloom was just outside, it made the dining area even more congenial.

Until the lights went out. 

Where we live, momentary lapses in power happen on a relatively regular occurrence.  Usually these are only long enough to screw up the clocks and force your computers to reboot.  

This wasn’t one of those times. 

We spent the next twenty minutes speculating what may have caused the outage and how extensive it was. Patrons and servers were consulting phones, searching diligently for information.  

“Was it the wind?”

“There was an accident behind the hospital.”

“A transformer blew downtown.”

“Must be more rolling blackouts.”

The most ominous of the theories was, “Someone shot out the grid.”

Our waitress came out of the kitchen into our dimly lit dining area and announced that they simply couldn’t continue with service under the circumstances.  Our friends decided to stay for another drink but Cindy and I bolted, hoping there was power on our island and I could get to our favorite dive for a pizza before they closed.

The rain was falling, the streets were eerily dark, the stoplights were out, and traffic was building as New Year’s Eve celebrants realized the evening was over and it was time to go home. As we crossed the bridge, aware that there were no lights behind us and only darkness ahead of us on the island, we realized there would be no pizza, no Chinese, no take-out at all.  We’d be foraging for food once we got to the house.

But as I drove, one thought kept intruding upon my thoughts of a cold holiday dinner.  Someone must have shot out the grid.

Such is the mind of a mystery writer…or a paranoid conspiracy theorist.  That’s what we do. We wonder what if? We wonder what if someone actually attacked our power supply like they did on December 3 in Moore County, North Carolina, not far from us, where someone with a rifle shot out two substations and knocked out electricity for 40,000 people for four days? 

I wonder how I can incorporate that into my new book????

The power of imagination.  It’s what keeps writers in front of their laptops and pumping out the prose.

So, my wife finished a salad she found in the refrigerator, and I made peanut and butter sandwiches, and we ate by candlelight in our kitchen.  We listened to fireworks as they went off in our neighborhood sounding like gunshots.  That didn’t quell my nervous imagination.

I found a live feed on my phone beaming images of fireworks displays from around the world that I pulled up at our table. My wife proclaimed that, “Boring.”

Then I found a movie and began to watch it, still chewing on my PJ&J sandwich.  Just before she left to go upstairs to read by candlelight, she told me, “I’m not watching a movie on your damned phone.”

The movie?  War of the Worlds.

Ah…new paranoid thought.  Was the darkness on New Year’s Eve caused by aliens?

In actuality, it was an insulator here on the island that had gone bad.  The salt air wreaks havoc on all manner of things.  We never did get our power back until five in the morning. 

I’m still not convinced it wasn’t aliens.  Such is the power of imagination.