Power Outage – A Mickey Smalls Story – Resuki: the Art of Andre Rex

by Andre Rex
(Context: Mickey Smalls is a Frankenstein Monster living as part of a magic mafia. This is a disembodied piece of story about him.)

Content Warning: drugs, abandonment, trauma survivor

The night the power went out was the first time I fully realized that I was alone.

I had been left in the basement bunker, and was there for nine weeks at that point. My father… my master, the one who created me, had told me to stay there until he came back. The news the very next day said that he was dead, but I couldn’t believe that. It had to be some kind of a trick. Some part of a plan of his, he always had plans. Master Long couldn’t be dead. That wasn’t like him.

When the power went out, it was more than just the darkness, it was the silence that shook me. An all-encompassing, deafening silence, as everything electronic went down. For a minute, I thought I was dead. But I was in too much pain to be dead. The last nine weeks hadn’t been kind to me. I was about six weeks clean, for the first time in my life – only because the drugs ran out. I was rationing the food store, originally intended to sustain a small core group of us for two weeks max, and I was hoping I could drag out what was left if I just tightened my belt.

Then there was the matter of the gluttony-demon in the sub-basement below me, slowly eating away at everything it could reach. The demon that I never wanted to summon in the first place and couldn’t banish now. The demon I was sure would be the end of me.

All my old injuries were flaring up from my anxious need to move and work every waking moment of every single day. Pain sensors were screaming and the addiction side of my brain was repeatedly telling me that I knew that only one thing would fix all of this, but I couldn’t get that anymore.

The power going out made it all real. The bill hadn’t been paid. They shut off the utilities. If the water was still on, it wouldn’t be for long. The heat wouldn’t hold up. There would be nothing, and the void around me mirrored that.

This wave of fear came over me, like nothing I’d ever, ever felt before. All I could do was hide. All I could do was keep my head down and listen to the nothingness and the racing of my own heart. The power going out meant something. It meant I was an idiot. Rationing things out, keeping myself busy, clinging to hope, just waiting for someone to come save me.

The power going out was the final nail in the coffin, and I broke. I don’t know how long I stayed hiding under my own bed like a child. I didn’t have the words for it at the time, but I was in a deep dissociative state. Out of body experience. Nothing was responding. Complete shutdown. Rescue was not going to come.

The building wasn’t the only one experiencing a power outage.

Bit by bit, I convinced my body to let me move again. Army crawled across the floor to the altar where I knew there was a candle and matches. I lit one and it was blinding, the warmth of the flame felt like I could come back into my body again. But even then, I sat on the floor with nothing but that little light and my crippling fear that had been a lurking threat every single day.

I hadn’t spent nine weeks in a bunker for absolutely no reason. Every time that I went up the stairs to the door and I reached to open it, I couldn’t. Not that it was locked, no, it wasn’t locked. I just couldn’t even bring myself to touch the handle. Because Master had said, “Stay here until I come back.” And I couldn’t not stay here, but he wasn’t coming back.

No one was coming to save me.

I finally got my feet underneath me, my candle in hand, and I made it up those stairs to the door one more time. I told myself over and over, he just meant to stay at the hotel grounds, he didn’t mean in the basement. You can go out that door and you’re not going against his orders. Just stay at the hotel, that’s what he meant, just stay at home, you’re grounded, you’re not a prisoner, you can go outside that door!
The click as it pushed open felt like the most powerful thing I had ever done in my life.

There were flurries of snow coming down around the pool, which smelled horrible from being abandoned, but who was I to judge? I stepped out into the freezing night, with only a pale green street light to show me the way. I had walked under that streetlight every single night for my whole fifteen or so years in this world, but I had never once looked at it. Really *looked* at it. As I watched the snow coming down and dancing in its light, it instantly became my friend. A kindred spirit. The last bit of power left of a once shining network. The last remaining light in this dark place.