Robert Lunday
When the Lights Went Out
“Did you forget to pay the electric bill again?” Lizzie asked. We were sitting on the couch, staring into black space after an extended discussion of our spending habits. It was late on a gusty night. Outside there was no moon and the darkness was thick.
“What do you mean, ‘Did you forget to pay the electric bill again?’” I replied. “Obviously, there’s a downed power line somewhere. Maybe you noticed that there are absolutely NO LIGHTS ON in the other houses.”
“I was just asking,” she answered.
I felt my right hand rise up, there in the dark, my middle finger poking out to form a vigorous fuck-you pointed at my wife though we were enveloped by darkness. In the lighted world I would never have done such a thing. We never called each other names or traded insults. But I had imagined things, and had seen in Lizzie’s eyes the unmistakable gleam of menace.
“Are you…shooting the bird at me?” Lizzie asked, there in the dark. I immediately lowered my hand, taken aback.
“Am I What? Of course I’m not ‘shooting the bird’ at you! What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know, Joe. Somehow, it felt like you were flipping me off just now.”
“Oh, for crying out loud! Seriously? You’re accusing me of something you couldn’t possibly know. It’s completely dark! That’s not rational, Lizzie.”
“Well, maybe you should stop being so rational.”
That was generally how our discussions ended. We both went silent.
Then I felt my right hand move again. It went out somewhere in front of my face, and I felt my palm looking at me. I couldn’t see it in the dark, but I could see it in my mind’s eye. It was my hand, pretending to be a mirror, but looking like an ugly baby – a squishy-faced infant that I was holding at arm’s length. It was judging me: without rancor, but coldly, absolutely.
Then the lights came on. I was holding my hand out, but when I actually saw it, it was not a weird baby or a soul-mirror, but just my wrinkly, faceless hand suspended above my knees. Lizzie, next to me, was holding her left hand chest-high, thumb up and index finger aimed at my heart. The sneer that must have been on her face when it was still dark had morphed into a look of indigestion. We both lowered our hands and stared at the blank TV. Then the lights went out again, and we sat together silently in the dark.
Robert Lunday's Disequilibria: Meditations on Missingness, winner of the 2022 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Award selected by Rigoberto Gonzalez, was recently published by the University of New Mexico Press. He lives in Houston, Texas.
