One New Year’s Eve in New York
(a short story)
Just a couple of hours before midnight, with the most mundane of motions, she flipped the light switch in the bathroom. The bulb flashed on for a second and then, abruptly, everything went dark. The entire apartment was black.
It must have been the heavy rain, which had been soaking the city all day and was still drumming on the window sills, that had seeped into the crumbling walls of the prewar building and made its way into its frayed electrical network, short-circuiting some little wire somewhere, leaving the two of them lost in darkness on New Year’s Eve.
Against all odds, a maintenance man was still in the building and he turned up at the apartment’s door a few minutes later — hat on, winter coat all zipped up and ready to go, holding a hefty flash light in one hand.
“I was jus’ about to leave,” he said meekly although he didn’t seem in a hurry. As he stepped into the dark apartment, his coffee-colored skin provided the perfect camouflage for his face and hands, which disappeared as if melting into the air. His khaki-colored coat and white sneakers moved slowly around the rooms and his flash light bounced off the…
