Blackout Season
2025.7.3
Setting:The American South, Year 2043
-----It was Day 41 of the heat wave. In Montgomery, Alabama, the asphalt shimmered like water and the birds had stopped singing. The cicadas screamed, though—their droning song rising like a warning siren, louder every year, like even nature couldn’t keep quiet anymore. Maya hadn’t had power for five days. No fans, no fridge, no signal. She sat on her porch, soaked in sweat, a damp rag over her neck and an old solar radio cranked to its highest setting. Static filled the gaps between desperate broadcasts.
“…heat index of 123 degrees… rolling grid failures now confirmed in Tallahassee, Atlanta, and Baton Rouge… residents advised to seek shade and hydration, if possible…”
-----There was no “if possible” anymore. Hydration came from melted ice in reused Gatorade jugs. Shade was a shared tarp nailed between buildings, where the old men played dominos in silence. This was what they called Blackout Season now. The name stuck sometime after 2037, when the “Summer Grid Event” took down power for nearly two weeks across seven southern states. After that, power companies stopped making promises. People stopped expecting them.
Living in the Red Zone
-----The South had always known heat. But this was different. This was heat that hunted. It killed crops, it buckled roads, it warped houses and turned trailers into ovens. Elderly folks died quietly in their chairs. Newborns were born into stifling homes, their cries already raspy. Dogs ran wild at night looking for water, and fights broke out at pump stations if someone cut the line.
-----Maya worked at what used to be a library—now called the Commons House. In the afternoons, it became a makeshift cooling center powered by a salvaged turbine and a jury-rigged solar roof. Everyone brought something to keep the place going—water, batteries, news, labor. They used old server fans scavenged from a shuttered Amazon facility to circulate air. Kids huddled in corners under water-misters made from converted drip systems. No one read books much anymore. But they still came to listen. To be together.
Faith and Fracture
-----The federal government hadn’t collapsed in the South. But it had faded—like paint left too long in the sun. Some governors stayed in office. FEMA came when it could. But most aid was local, tribal, church-based. The
New Baptists built shade domes behind their sanctuaries—geodesic structures woven from hempcrete and salvaged billboard vinyl. They preached sermons about Exodus, about surviving the desert. About finding light not in comfort, but in each other. A lot of people had left. Fled to Cascadia, the Free Coast, even the colder parts of the Reclaimed Midwest. But others stayed. Some said it was pride. Others said it was faith. Maya thought it was both. You didn’t run from your roots. You grew deeper.
A Break in the Pattern
-----On Day 44, the wind changed. Clouds rolled in from the Gulf—huge, dark, and growling. The sky cracked open just before sunset, dumping warm, sticky rain onto the dust-baked streets. The smell hit Maya like a memory: wet clay, creosote, and miracle. She ran into the street barefoot, laughing, arms outstretched. All around her, neighbors did the same. Buckets clanged. Babies cried. People danced on rooftops. Later that night, the solar radio crackled back to life.
“Grid sections expected to return within 48 hours… emergency cool zones expanding through regional partnerships… announcement from the new Southeastern Power Compact forthcoming…”
Something New in the Heat
-----That phrase stuck in her head: Southeastern Power Compact. Word was, local engineers from Georgia, Mississippi, and northern Florida had broken from the national grid entirely. Said they were done being the last ones helped and the first ones cut. They’d built a “heat-first” power model—microgrids, regional energy shares, decentralized solar banks under community control. Maybe it was just talk. But maybe not.
-----Because that’s how things worked now—in the slow crumble of the old world, what mattered was who showed up next. Not who used to be in charge. And here in the South, where the air was thick enough to drown in and people’s bones remembered pain and praise in equal measure, they weren’t waiting anymore. They were building shade, catching rain, and wiring something better beneath the dust. Something powered by memory, by hope, and by the unkillable rhythm of survival.
Blackout Season would return.
But so would they.