Brianne Garcia

Besides the beams from the helicopters, the only light pouring through the city came from idling police cars and tiny bonfire flares marking lanes up and down the roads.

This is how the island must have appeared to early explorers, a quiet, peaceable drift of dirt cut off the mainland. Broadway cut the island down the middle, once an animal trail, retread by Indians, bricked and then paved and then lined in store chains by European colonists. In the darkness, one city ––alive, adrenaline-pumped, unrelenting to any force of weather or hour, colored by every shade of idiosyncrasy–– drifted into shadow, and another city emerged, heaps of steal and concrete jutting upward, dreaming arrogantly of value in height, no matter now if those owners of penthouses and balconies were marooned in their own sky hubs.

Joseph swerved back from the ledge and gave a final look at the darkened sea of buildings. To the west, a band of low, black clouds gathered, silent and sharp with rain.

Eerily applicable excerpt from Lightning People, a novel by Christopher Bollen. I read it over a year ago and for some reason, felt the urge to grab it off my bookshelf and thumb through. I think a lot of people often fantasize / wonder about Manhattan going dark, losing power both literally and figuratively. My nieghborhood (Chinatown) didn’t even receive the worst of it, but I lost power for days. And it sucked.