This post is part of StoryADay May (https://storyaday.org/) #StoryADay #StoryADayMay @storyadaymay #freeshortstory @HollyJahangiri

No electricity today for some reason, so I’m hoping my battery holds out!

I’m using John Howell’s finger point prompt method today. Grabbed the book I’m reading, opened it at random and pointed at random. The word I got:

Chills

It was fun to slip out of the house while my folks and my sisters were sound asleep, meeting the other guys under the streetlight on the corner. Nothing ever happens in this big turnaround that Mom calls a cul-de-sac. Hickory Circle, just off Hickory Way in Hickory Hollow Acres (no visible hickories within five miles). Sneaking out tonight was like the highlight of my life.

“What’ll we do?” Pauly asked. “Mart? What’s the plan?”

Mart was the one who always had the plan.

He hefted a cloth bag with handles, bulging with uneven roundnesses.

“Got toilet paper,” he said, with an evil grin. “Got eggs.”

Brad looked unimpressed. “No little paper bags? No dog poop? No matches?”

Mart stuck his chin out like he was going to punch Brad with it. “Did you? Let’s see what you brought.”

Brad never brought anything but wet blankets to throw over anybody else’s ideas. I don’t know why we hung out with him except we always had.

I said, “We ought to do this on another block. If we do our own houses, we’ll just have to clean it up even if nobody knows it was us that did it. If we do houses but not our own, everybody’ll know it was us that did it.”

“See,” Pauly said, “that’s what I’m talking about. Brains.”

Naturally, the other guys raised their arms toward me and moaned, “Braiiiinnnzzz!”

“Cut it out,” I said, slapping their arms down. I mean, it was funny and all, but it would have been funnier at noon than it was at night with shadows everywhere.

Then, click, all the lights went off at once. The LED street lights just faded, but inside the houses all the night lights, all the late-night televisions, all the midnight snack kitchen lights, all the outdoor security lights, all went off. Our street for three blocks and the streets on either side for three blocks, a whole big square, just dark and us in the middle.

Except for one.

The new couple, the ones with stuff in the front that looks like a garden but the woman told my mom you could eat it all and with a vegetable garden in the back instead of a gas barbecue grill and with a little house on wheels with a fence attached and chickens in it. Their bedroom lights came on. The lights that lined their walk and drive never did go off.

All our eyes went to that house. I mean, what else could we see?

“I knew it,” Pauly said. “I always said they were weirdos. Their little kid is a weirdo. My little brother says their little kid comes to school with these like lines all over his face like he sleeps in a pod or something.”

We couldn’t look away from the house. Without knowing it, we crept closer, all in a bunch. When we were just outside the shadows of them walking across the lit window in their upstairs I heard a hum.

“You guys hear that? That hum?”

They each whispered that they did. We edged around the window light toward the back of the house. The hum got louder.

“Is it their heat pump?” I said. “If their lights are on, stands to reason their heat pump is, too.”

“My heat pump don’t sound like that,” Brad said. “That sounds more like some other kind of machine.”

Mart started making a terrible choking sound. We moved away from him and stared. He went to his knees and put his sack of tp and eggs gently beside himself, then clutched his belly. He looked up at us. He was laughing.

“Zzhhen,” he gasped. He took a deep breath. “It’s a generator! They got a generator! That little kid prolly can’t breathe when he sleeps like my Uncle Dan and they got a generator so he won’t smother if the electricity goes out!”

Then everybody was laughing except Pauly, because we were all pointing at him and saying stuff like, “Pod people!” and “Weiiiiiiiird.”

“Okay,” Pauly said, “very funny. I knew better, but I had you guys going, didn’t I?”

“Oh, yeah, yeah, you knew better….”

By and by, we got tired of that. Mart picked up his bag and we went back into the dark.

Behind us, a gravelly voice said, “Boo.”

MY PROMPT FOR TODAY: Chill

MA