And there, there overhead, there, there, hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness, the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing — nothing at all.

–Archibald MacLeish

Ryan knew the instant he opened his eyes that he was going to be fired.

The curtains covering the windows of his cramped living room no longer glowed with afternoon summer sunlight as they had when he stretched out on the couch for a quick power nap thirty minutes earlier. At least it was supposed to have been thirty minutes earlier, but naps had a funny way of turning into full blown sleep when you forgot to set your alarm.

Three months of unemployment had rewired Ryan’s brain into believing that naps were now a requirement, a necessary half-hour of downtime that kept him functioning through the blank pages of his days. More than that, he had come to see a nap as a vital step in what he considered his “creative process.” Before he would even start to rework another cover letter for another company that would send him another “Thank you for applying, but” email, Ryan would close the curtains to block out as much of the Texas sun as possible and set his alarm for thirty minutes. When the alarm sounded, he would arise a new man, refreshed and full of ideas for how to better present himself to potential employers. On good days he could see the perfect closing line printed out right there in his dream, Times New Roman font hanging in the air even when he opened his eyes.

But then he’d actually landed a job, and things had changed. Getting on at the Honey Grove Herald had been a godsend, make no mistake, but the disruption to his daily naps had been like kicking a bad drug habit. When noon rolled around each day Ryan found he couldn’t think straight, he became irritable, and when he finally dragged himself home at 4 in the evening all he wanted to do was curl up on the couch for a short nap–just a short one, ten minutes, fifteen max–but those evening naps almost always left him feeling worse instead of better. The golden hour of napping came and went each day after lunch while he was stuck staring bleary-eyed at a Word document, his third cup of burnt coffee no stronger than decaf in the face of his withdrawal. It was like his body knew exactly when it was time for his daily fix and, upon being denied its expected and necessary dose, promptly shut down all upstairs operations until it got its way. This lack of productivity in the office meant Ryan took most of his work home every day, where he could have a quick nap (ten minutes, I swear!) and then hammer out a whole article before the sun went down. Was it an efficient way to write an article? No. But it worked, and it had worked for the last three weeks he’d been employed.

Until today.

Ryan leapt up from the couch, his phone and TV remote flying across the room as he threw off his blanket. One of them, he wasn’t sure which, sounded like it exploded from the impact, but he didn’t have time to look. He turned on the corner lamp and straightened the pages fanned out on the coffee table, a lead ball of dread settling in his gut at how much work he had to do before tomorrow. Each sheet of printer paper had a keyword for his assigned article scrawled at the top, leaving him a whole lot of blank space to write out ideas and figure out where the story would lead him. Despite, or maybe because of, the extra hours of couch sleep Ryan had received, he still had no idea how to make this one work. The current assignment was an especially uninspiring writeup of a town council meeting from the day before, one involving tax cuts and spending budgets and a great deal of other lines less interesting than a play-by-play commentary of paint drying, but Ryan recognized it as a necessary rung on the ladder to becoming a real reporter. Everyone had to start somewhere, and even writing about the percentages of Honey Grove’s annual budget allocation was a step up from the handful of opinion pieces he’d written so far.

But oh, how he missed those opinion pieces now.

Ryan flipped open the manila folder containing the meeting’s minutes and began copying over important finance figures onto the appropriate blank page, wondering if it would be better to make a pot of coffee or just go lie down in the street and call it a night. Before he could decide, the passing sound of squealing tires came to him from outside, followed by a loud crash. Ryan looked up and froze, his ears dimly humming in the silence that followed. He waited to hear a car door open or another car pull up, anything to indicate that his assistance wasn’t needed and that he could get back to his article, but for several seconds he heard nothing at all. Then came the blare of a car horn that sounded like it was right outside the window, another long screech that grew louder instead of fading away, and then a metal KTHUNK that Ryan actually felt through the floor.

The lights went out half a second later, as did the A/C, refrigerator, and anything else plugged into a wall.

Ryan blinked, his eyes instinctively widening in an effort to distinguish light from the darkness that invaded his living room. All he managed to find was a thin strip of yellow that stood out like a highlighter mark on the floor beneath the window curtains, shadows drifting through it as people passed in front of headlights outside. Worry shifted to fear as Ryan rose to his feet and carefully approached the front door. What the hell was going on out there? Two accidents and a power outage? He debated whether or not to open his door, his mind filled with the openings of half a dozen zombie movies where scenes exactly like this happened, always just seconds before a horde of infected broke down the doors of everyone stupid enough to poke their heads outside, but he shook the thought away and reached for the door knob. Someone might actually need help out there. And anyway, a car crashing into a power pole was a bit more likely than an undead apocalypse unfolding at his doorstep.

A second thought, this one somewhat more realistic, crossed his mind and again stopped his hand from touching the doorknob. If a car had slammed into his street’s power pole hard enough to kill the power, didn’t that mean power lines were down? The crash had sounded like it was right in front of his house. He pictured sparking wires writhing madly at his doorstep like black snakes, waiting for him to touch the metal doorknob so they could inject their venom into his hand and fry his nervous system. Ryan gritted his teeth and grabbed the handle anyway, not wanting his nap-enhanced imagination to be the reason some poor soul bled to death in their car ten feet away.

There was no electrocution as the door swung inward, no electric serpents dancing at his welcome mat. There also were no zombies, he noted, which was good. The power outage was limited to his house alone, it seemed, as every other window along his street glowed with light from inside. He noted with a bit of inward humor that the zombie movies had gotten it right after all; all down the street people stood silhouetted in the door frames of every single home. If it had been zombies, well, there was no doubt about it. They’d all be dead.

Ryan turned his attention to the more important matter of the night: the three cars that weren’t where they should have been. The first (and arguably the most obvious) car had its front fender jammed a good foot into the wall of his bedroom. Smoke rose up from the crumpled hood where the car had taken out what Ryan guessed was his home’s connection to the powerline. A second and third car sat sideways on the road, fenders dented in what looked like a minor rear end collision. Ryan took in the scene and pieced together what had happened: Car A hits Car B, blocks the road, Car A tries to warn an approaching Car C with a horn blast but is a second too late, Car C swerves and skids into the corner of a house. Ryan’s house, because of all the other homes it could have hit, why would the universe allow any other to lose power? Wasn’t like he was busy or anything.

But that wasn’t even the worst part. The real problem would be getting his landlord to fix the new window his bedroom had suddenly gained.

Something about the crash bothered him, though. No one had been injured, at least not that Ryan could tell, but every face he looked at was turned in the same direction. That would have been expected if they had been turned toward the smoking cars, but not one person was looking at the crash. The people standing at their doors, a man straddling his bicycle on the sidewalk (the dumbass doesn’t even have a headlamp on, Ryan thought), even the people in the cars that had been in the crash, they were all looking in the same direction up over the rooftops. Ryan followed their gaze to a patch of empty night not unlike the rest of the sky above them, dark and rich and brimming with starlight, no full moon casting its haze into the night to spoil what must have been the most beautiful view of the Milky Way he had ever seen. His phone buzzed from inside but he ignored it, too caught up in the wonder of seeing the creamy brushstroke of the galaxy stretched out above him. It was a sight he hadn’t seen since he was a boy staring up from his childhood backyard outside of town, miles away from another porch light. There was also the awestruck, somewhat unsettling silence of the people around him, people who seemed fully hypnotized by the stars and unable to look away. Sure, the stars were bright and beautiful tonight, but that was nothing to wreck a car or two over, was it?

Ryan tore his gaze downward and started to ask a nearby woman what he had missed, if there had maybe been a meteor or fireball that had drawn everyone’s attention skyward, but before he opened his mouth the streetlight across from him hummed to life and cast a weak, orange-tinted glow down onto the sidewalk. As if following some unheard call to action, the next streetlight came on, then the next one, and the next, until the whole street began to glow under the dull red of warming bulbs.

That’s what was different, he thought, looking up as the stars appeared to lose some of their luster to the brightening street. The streetlights were off. Which didn’t make sense, as they were all automated by those little light sensors that detected when it got dark. Sometimes a good summer thunderstorm was enough to trigger them, but they were always on by 8 this time of year, 9 at the latest. Before he had time to consider this further, Ryan again heard the sound of his phone faintly buzzing from inside the house. He took another look at the fading stars before retreating back inside to see who was calling him.

Face down, his phone crawled across the linoleum with each burst of buzzing, but as Ryan reached down for it his hand froze. A floaty haze of unreality settled over him and for just a moment he was almost certain he was about to wake up from a dream. He must have still been on the couch napping safely in the land of logic where swerving cars didn’t target his house and people didn’t all stare silently up at the night sky, because the sound coming from his phone wasn’t his ringtone. It was the annoying, repetitive chirp he heard every single morning at 6AM before waking up for work. The same sound he also heard every afternoon right after his 4:30 nap.

It was his alarm.

Ryan picked up the phone and tapped STOP beneath a box informing him that it was in fact only 5PM, that his thirty minute nap was over now and he could start working on his article. Dazed, he drifted back to the doorway and joined the rest of the street—the rest of the entire Western Hemisphere—in staring up at the place the sun should have been but wasn’t.