In-Feeding

When the lights go out, we leave our cold dwellings and roam the slippery, damp darkness in search of electricity. On the second day, our heads turn black, our skulls soften and fill with translucent, sweet nectar that oozes from the cuts we accidentally make while shaving blindly and freezes into intricate shapes like icicles or wax stains on old candles. The mouths we gape to express our hunger open in the most unexpected, anatomically inappropriate places and snap with their many glass teeth, ripping the frost apart and tearing the rags our clothes have become over the winter. Our thoughts become blurred and dissipate like steam over a vat of bubbling liquid, where our permanent rage and bloodthirsty hatred boil without end. Our children hoot in their bottomless, icy cradles with a terrible whooping cough, through which, if you listen closely enough, you can discern the first word that steals their silence. "Illustricity! Illictricity!" our mindless children cry with eerie clarity, clawing with their gnarled, bony fingers at the sleety cast iron of the radiators. Our Dalmatian dogs howl longingly, their bloody muzzles raised towards the moon blurred by the winter fog, their mournful wailing cutting through the surrounding darkness for miles around like air-raid alarms or the many-voiced howls of a blizzard.

Our women swell and shrink in the manner of egg whites in boiling water, trying to reduce their heat output and increase their energy capacity, reaching the shape of a ball or a cube, and hide in the corners of their miserable homes waiting for their husbands. When they finally return, carrying nothing but the unbearable stench of diesel fumes and incoherent curses in their horrible beaks instead of their nourishing prey, the wives express their frustration by shrieking and pouncing on their husbands like harpies, tearing their swollen faces to the bone to reach their eyes, long since shrunken and covered with a white film like birds' eyelids. Some of the men have bone-anchored headlamps that glow in their foreheads like the illitia of deep-sea anglerfish, but their feeble light is enough only to thicken the otherworldly darkness in the corners rather than dispel it from their dens for good.

Ravenous corpses wriggle in their graves, digging long, winding tunnels into the frozen ground with the tenacity of soulless machines, and eventually dig themselves out on garbage dumps and wastelands. Indistinguishable in the darkness from the city's inhabitants, they join the crowds that fill the streets, drifting mindlessly to the sweet sound of car engines. People flock to the generators like predators, closing around them in silent, tight rings and standing for hours, blissfully squinting their sightless eyes, reveling in the bass vibrations of the fuel hearts, swaying slightly and only occasionally breaking the silence with barely audible sounds that have long since replaced speech: coughs, grunts, creaks, short groans and sobs. People's sensitive nostrils flare, sniffing out the ozone traces of electricity in the clouds of exhaust.

To prevent any attempt on their lives, each generator is guarded by an armed detachment of a special security force, the Electro-Patrol. Its members stand out from the crowd by the oil sheen of their black gutta-percha uniforms, which are tight just enough to display their strength and courage. However, on particularly cold, weatherless evenings, when the excitement on the streets is at its highest, even the valiant Electropatrolmen have to contend with panic. It shows in the way they shift nervously from foot to foot, in the anxious glances they exchange during smoke breaks with their impenetrable latex masks rolled up, and in the assault rifles that tremble impatiently against their broad chests to the beat of their burning hearts. On the southern outskirts, they say, the heat of passion recently reached such heights that in the morning all that was found in the place of a large industrial generator was a pile of mangled metal scraps, and all the pavement around it was stained with hardened black tar spots like those left by burnt tyres, and only the boldest would speculate on the fate of the Electropatrolmen who had left these sinister traces.

Guided more by fear than a sense of duty, the authorities, who have lost faith in the strength of their bunker walls, contact the emergency services and make a desperate joint effort to breathe new life into the infrastructure. But now it is too late: the toppled pylons of power lines lie in the snow-covered fields like giant skeletons of prehistoric creatures, the remnants of high-voltage cables lie blackened in the drifts like abandoned snake crawlers, the steel doors of substations have been torn apart, their doorways gape into gloomy emptiness, the torn bellies of switchboards ooze cable piles of untidy electrobowels. Only a few miraculously surviving transformers in the central districts respond to attempts to infuse galvanic blood into the city's veins with hysterical outbursts of sparks, crackles, pops, explosions, and finally tall, jolly torches of blindingly bright flame, like effigies on a British Guy Fawkes night, and it takes many a night to put out the fires, after which the almost awakened city sinks back into its magnificent grave hibernation.

/Feb '23