Outage by John Updike

The weatherpersons on television, always eager for ratings-boosting disasters, had predicted a fierce autumn storm for New England, with driving rain and high winds. Brad Morris, who worked at home while his wife, Jane, managed a boutique on Boston’s Newbury Street, glanced out his windows now and then at the swaying trees—oaks still tenacious of their rusty leaves, maples letting go in gusts of gold and red—but was unimpressed by the hyped news event. Rain came down heavily a half hour at a time, then pulled back into a silvery sky of fast-moving, fuzzy-bottomed clouds. The worst seemed to be over, when, in midafternoon, his computer died under his eyes. The financial figures he had been painstakingly assembling swooned as a group, sucked into the dead blank screen like glittering water pulled down a drain. Around him, the house seemed to sigh, as all its lights and little engines, its computerized timers and indicators, simultaneously shut down. The sound of wind and rain lashing the trees outside infiltrated the silence. A beam creaked. A loose shutter banged. The drip from a plugged gutter tapped heavily, like a bully nagging for attention, on the wooden cover of a cellar-window well.

The lines bringing the Morrises’ house electricity and telephone service and cable television came up, on three poles, through two acres of woods. Brad stepped outside in the storm’s lull, in the strangely luminous air, to see if he could spot any branches fallen on his lines. He saw none, and no window lights in the nearest house, barely visible through the woods whose leaves in summer hid it entirely. The tops of the tallest trees were heaving in a wind he barely felt; a spatter of thick cold drops sent him back into the house, where drifts of shadow were sifting into the corners and the furnace ticked in the basement as its metal cooled. Without electricity, there was nothing to do.

He opened the refrigerator and was surprised by its failure to greet him with a welcoming