Brown Out

 The power is out.

It has been for some time. He cannot tell how long. The television is black. The clock above it is frozen at 2:17. The second hand died mid-twitch.

He faces three walls and a dark screen.

The silence presses.

He knows madness. He has visited it before. He used to deliver it.

Now he sits in his chair - strapped, angled, parked - a monument to gravity. Once, one of the aides called him an oversized paperweight.

She thought he was asleep.

She had laughed into her phone, her words thick with shortcuts and swallowed consonants. He had wanted to correct her. Once he would have corrected her with volume. Or a hand.

He had solved most of his life with hands.

Pain was how he communicated.

Now he cannot even clear his throat.

Once, he emptied rooms.

Now he occupies one.

The last time he stood on his own two feet, he had blood on his hands.

He had broken a beer pitcher across a man’s face because the man laughed too loudly. There had been blood in the foam. Then came the friends. There were always friends. He handled them too.

He had always handled things.

On the drive home that night, a deer stepped into his headlights. He swerved. The alcohol slowed him. The pills slowed him. The punches he’d taken slowed him.

The guardrail tore open.

The car spun.

Then there was a month of nothing.

He was awake for two days before anyone noticed.

He has not spoken since.

Months of therapy gave him back his left hand. Two fingers twitch when he tries hard enough. The rest of him belongs to the chair.

And now he sits.

Alone with an inventory.

His childhood was a ledger of beatings. He decided early that pain was currency. Once grown, he redistributed it generously - girlfriends, coworkers, strangers, one unfortunate supervisor.

His hands are scarred. His face, too. In the black television screen, he studies the man he has become.

Half of him has withered. The other half remembers.

The room cools.

He feels dampness beneath him but does not remember when it happened. That is the worst part now - not the act, but the delay.

He does not always realize when he soils himself. He only knows by the way they speak to him afterward.

Twice a day he is changed. Three if fortune smiles.

They complain to him while they work. They narrate his indignity. They tell him what he smells like. They call him things they would not call a dog.

He cannot respond.

He cannot apologize.

He cannot scream.

The power flickers once. On. Off.

Not even a storm.

Maybe the building will burn, he thinks.

It does not.

Darkness thickens. The aide mutters into her phone. She doesn’t want to be stuck here in the dark with “ol’ Mr. Poopydraws.”

His anger rises on instinct.

It has nowhere to go.

He cannot punch. Cannot shout. Cannot even grind his teeth properly. Rage collapses inward, becomes pressure behind the eyes.

She quits before night fully settles. Throws her phone into her bag. Says she has better places to be. The door slams.

He is alone.

The sore on his hip burns. A new one forming. He feels the damp heat beneath him and wonders if infection would be a kindness.

He sleeps.

In dreams, he is a hundred years old and still sitting here. Still waiting. In the dream he can scream. The scream tears at his throat and fills the room.

When he wakes, the lights are back.

The television is on. Some show he would have mocked in another life. He has no vote now.

A new aide stands over him. Thirty-something. Broad-shouldered. Skin the color of caramel. An accent he cannot place.

She speaks gently.

He cannot understand every word.

He understands the gag.

He understands the pause before she touches him.

He understands the look.

For the first time in his life, he is the thing people endure.

The clock on the wall has started again.

2:19.

2:20.

2:21.

She turns the television louder before she leaves the room.

He sits.

Waiting.

Staring.

by M.C. Metzger © 2026