We insulate the attic here because the enemy is heat. If you ever get around to doing something as un-texan as insulating your floors, go ahead and update your plumbing and start wearing sandals.

When the cold came and the power shut down, a bubble formed around our bubble. Suddenly we were deeper, more separate from the greater world than I had thought possible. Before, we only went to the grocery store when necessary and always wore masks, now there was no grocery store.

There was no longer a quorum to meet and pilot the machine of our city, so the machine stopped. It was like the engines cutting out in an airplane. No one knew how far it could glide. 

I yelled over the klaxon: “HI, I’M DRIVING TO THE PALMER EVENTS CENTER. THEY HAVE A WARMING CENTER THERE NOW. I DON’T KNOW IF THEY HAVE FOOD OR SLEEPING PLACES OR ANYTHING, ALL I KNOW IS ITS WARM. DO YOU WANT A RIDE?”

I desperately wanted some authorized arm of the state to coordinate my actions, so as to have the maximum level of integration with everything else. How many people like me were out there?

I felt more like a criminal digging through a dumpster than at any other time, doing any other thing I may have done in my past. Hunger and need carry more social stigma than breaking the law.

“I know you think there are hungry people and you think that you are helping them but all of this food is bad. All of it.”

They were so effective, the city gave them a phone number to report outages and a workspace in the Palmer Events Center. When the National Guard arrived in Austin, they were sent, not to the Emergency Operations Center, but to the ANW offices to help in any way they could.

…two sweet kids brought us frozen raspberry treats shaped like flowers, which they had made out of things that were thawing in the freezer. Finally, before we left, we were each presented with a rose, slightly wilted, obviously re-purposed but, I felt, more than we deserved. Gratitude was these kids’ project.

After the mirror crashed, the talk show was replaced by loud, industrial death metal, and the tenant played along in fast 16th notes, as if we were all in a band together with him on bass and the rest of us destroying a house.

“OFF! OFF!!!” Micheal yelled over the phone. Upon inspection, I saw the center cap had blown out of the faucet, ricocheting off the ceiling and coming to rest on the porch in front of the door. The sink was dry.

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