Photo by Winston Chen on Unsplash
I walk by my CD player on the way out of my room. It was still plugged into the wall beside my tower of ancient CDs. Like most people I took a hammer to my phone in frustration, but I still had hopes that someday electricity would return and I could get my tunes back. Inside me, my heart turns over.
Going gridless didn’t happen all at once, until all at once, it did. Gas and oil prices climbed, then rolling hour-long blackouts happened here-and-there. Then they got longer while the electric bills increased each month even as usage plummeted. No oil to make electric and the administration had said wind turbines caused cancer and solar energy contributed to the climate crisis. They had shut down renewable grants, tax deductions, and governmental project after project. I remember them going as far as to destroy some wave energy production off the coasts since they impacted some shipping lanes.
With no alternatives in place, the electric shut down two days into a cold snap in early February 2027 was inevitable. Living in Texas made it worse as the state still hadn’t finished hardening its electrical grid against weather even after the winter disasters in 2021 and 2022.
They forgot to tell you that wells run on electric, and pumps, and sewer controls.
They forgot to tell you cable, internet, cell towers, and everything else of modern life needs the grid to work.
Food, refrigeration, irrigation, milk pumping, everything is…was electric.
Music, books, video, pictures, everything on the cloud, on the web, on subscription. Gone.
Even with Texas sunshine, the solar production, which wasn’t inconsiderable, couldn’t get to the right places because the grid not only failed, it had been destroyed.
At least that is the rumor. Someone – Russian or Iran or whatever the person telling you hates – got in and destroyed some of our special hubs, wiping us out. I don’t know if it is true; I don’t have the internet to check and my wind-up emergency radio can’t pick up any radio stations because, guess what, electric is needed to power them.
I remember rushing to charge phones and laptops and all the electronic specials of life when the lights flicked during the rolling blackouts at the end of 2026. Dad and I installed a windmill in the backyard, but nobody said it needed to be over a certain height to be effective. And for us, in the middle of trees, the answer was nope. Just like for solar energy. Going gridless meant no electric possible. We keep hoping someone will connect our little community back to the world, but I don’t think the world wants to help us.
I don’t know if the world can help us.
Making my way through the quiet house (my parent needed dialysis regularly and there was no regular to be had even if I had the means to get him to the facility from our secluded development ten miles out of town), I ignore the kitchen. The neighbors and I would eat my one meal a day together later. It saved on wood and made sure everyone got something to eat, especially the littles. Then everyone will pile together to sleep in Janice’s house, each with our own bit of floor to share heat now that we are heading into fall again.
The harvest has been pulled in from the farm which had backed our community and I needed a me day, so I headed to my house which I hadn’t been in for two months. Harvesting without gas took all hands, which can get very crowded in a tent community since no one had running cars to go home each night.
Forget commuting into the city for jobs. Are they fairing better or worse there? Since June of 2027, no one had meandered through our little piece of paradise named after the deer we displaced and containing roads of the trees cut down. The couple’s eyes had been haunted describing the food riots. We fed them with the berries and weeds which had grown in the spring, house supplies long gone in the four months since the hard frost killed the grid. We didn’t give any indication of the five homesteaders which had had pigs and ducks who lived in the back of the gated development, nor of the working farm we had all trooped out to help in March. They continued south to their family in Mexico, hoping things were better there.
Everything in my home is still in place; dusty but in place.
I wanted music. The electric piano didn’t work. Everything requiring batteries had failed long ago.
No lights, no phones, no clocks. The car hadn’t moved since gas pushed past $20 a gallon.
I found my little egg. It was a percussion instrument which you can shake, black and egg-shape. I enjoyed the hiss as I shook it. Dad’s trumpet from his college days was covered in a thick layer of dust in his room and my sister’s violin case equally covered in her room waiting for her to collect it when she returns home from college in the summer of 2027, three years ago.
I hope she is safe in Vermont. It would be cold as shit there, but something like 99% of their grid was on renewables when she researched where she wanted to go to school, plus it would have been hardened against weather. Food, though, would be much more of a problem with their longer winters and higher population density.
I close the door on her bedroom.
I found the recorder in the box of toys we kept for when my oldest brother used to visit with his kids. Plastic piece of crap like we used to play in middle-school music class; something that could be dipped in bleach to prevent transferring diseases. Returning to the piano, I open one of the old hymnals Dad kept there and tried to figure out the fingering.
(words 999; first published 11/1/2026)
That’s bleak.