After the Wires Came Down

Esme had been born in 2034. The Big Failure had been in 2031. She had, therefore, never lived a single day in a town that had power.

This was not, where Esme lived, unusual. The whole region had been off the grid for fourteen years. The country, technically, still had electricity in the major cities. The smaller regions had been deprioritised during the Failure's third year, and had never been re-prioritised. The official line was that they would be reconnected eventually. Fourteen years was, by now, an eventually that nobody had a date for.

Esme's town had adapted.

The town had, in those fourteen years, become — Esme thought sometimes — a pretty good town. There was no power, but there was light at night: oil lamps, beeswax candles, a small windmill on the hill that ran a single radio every Sunday for the whole town to listen to the regional news. There was no internet, but there was a newspaper, printed on a press in the town's old stationery shop, twice a week. There was no refrigerator, but there were three working ice-houses cut into the limestone hill behind the town, kept cold by their own old engineering. There was no online school, but there was a school in the old church hall, with seven teachers and one hundred and forty children, where Esme had been a student for nine years.

The town worked. It was not the town her grandfather had known. It was a different town,in the same place.

The summer Esme was fourteen, her grandfather Theo came to live with the family.

He was eighty-six. He had been living, since her grandmother died two years before, alone in the next town over. He had become, finally, too frail to keep his small house. The family had moved him in. He had — Esme noticed at once — a particular sadness about the move that her parents had not quite noticed. Esme noticed because Esme noticed things. Her grandfather, for the first month, was very quiet.

Esme decided, on her own, to make a project of him.

She started with a question.

"Grandpa. What was it like?"

He looked up at her. He was sitting in the small armchair by the kitchen window, in the late-summer light, a cup of cold tea in his hand.

"What was what like, my darling?"

"The before. Power. The internet. All of it. You lived your whole young life with it. I have lived my whole life without it. Tell me what I'm missing."

He took a long breath.

He was not, he said, sure where to start.

"Try. Start with — what it felt like to wake up."

He thought.

"It felt like — there was a pulse, in the walls of the house, that you could not hear, but that was always there. Power was a quiet hum. The fridge was on. The radio was on. The wifi was on. The clocks were on. The streetlights, when you stepped outside, were on. Every wall and every street had a small pulse. We did not, at the time, notice the pulse. The pulse was the air we breathed. Then, in 2031, the pulse stopped. For three months. And then, here — for fourteen years. The world without the pulse felt — at first — like a held breath."

"And now?"

"Now? Now the world has — rearranged. Most of us have stopped expecting the pulse. There are still days I miss it. There are some days I do not miss it. The town