Daniel’s birthday happened to be an F day in Brooklyn. The soldiers at FEMA’s Navy Yard outpost would let Morgan Foster through today. They would let her charge a power bank for a few minutes.

Morgan had no power bank. All day yesterday she had searched for one and found nothing. To trade she had brought the old hand-crank flashlight she’d unearthed from the back of her closet a few days after 2/12.

She and Daniel used to play with that flashlight in their tent, when they were old enough to have their own tent. They would take turns making shadow puppets against the tent wall while the other cranked the flashlight. Watching the world appear, disappear with the turn of her hand—it made her feel powerful, like God himself making light.

Morgan crawled out of bed and stumbled to the kitchen. A pathetic trickle ran from the faucet. It was a trickle more than ran from the faucet every other day of the week. She’d forgotten it was a Monday. FEMA powered the Bed-Stuy municipal water pumps only on Mondays, from 11 a.m. to noon.

She hurried to put a stockpot in the kitchen sink, then ran across her apartment and put a mixing bowl in the bathroom sink, a mop bucket under the bath tap. Judging from the angle of sunlight slanting through the window, she had almost entirely slept through the most important hour of the week.

Altogether, she collected a small fraction of what she usually managed. Three cups of water to drink until next Monday; but first it was Daniel’s birthday, and her phone was dead.

She’d tried taking her phone and its power cable to the Navy Yard before. A soldier had shouted at her and pushed her back into the crowd of surname Fs all clamoring for a charge. They only took power banks or battery packs. She’d heard stories of people getting shot for trying to charge their phones and laptops.

Nothing for it but to take back the power bank she had lent to the food distribution center on 14th Street. Her little power bank was worth only a few minutes of refrigeration there. She would charge it at the Navy Yard, turn her phone on, and return it to the distribution center tomorrow. She just needed it for the one day, his birthday. They could spare it for just the day.

She poured water from the mop bucket into a bottle, took a small sip, stopped herself from drinking any more. The bottle, a small sooty pot, her phone, and a book at random from the pile all went into her bag, and she went out the back window, onto the fire escape, up the ladder to the roof. But on the final rung she stopped, seeing what had become of her garden.

The garden bed remained. The pepper, squash, tomato, and cucumber plants were all gone. Her ten-gallon potato bucket lay on its side, plundered, soil spilled all over the roof.

“It wasn’t me,” said Peter.

His hands were covered in dirt, but she believed him. Peter stole from her garden every day, but only what he needed. Less than what he needed.

Before the CME, she knew him only as the potbellied man with receding red hair who often walked his dachshund down their street. The dog would walk on one side of the sidewalk, Peter fully on the other, oblivious to the leash that stretched between them, preventing anyone—Morgan, as it always transpired—from passing.

She had not seen the dachshund in five months, Peter’s hair was gone, and he was no longer potbellied. In fact, he looked too thin.

She kicked the side of the garden bed, which was nothing but a bookshelf laid on its back, shelves removed. Sweat dripped down her brow. Daniel’s birthday was always a hot, sunny day. The middle of July. Everyone always expected him to have a party on the beach, a barbeque in the park. He hated things like that, being the center of attention.

When they were kids their parents threw him a surprise party in the backyard and invited his whole third grade class. She’d helped organize a scavenger hunt and obstacle course. Daniel had run off to his room and stuffed his head between two pillows. He couldn’t stand games; he couldn’t bring himself to compete against anyone, not even for fun.

“Got the whole street,” Gene shouted from the neighboring roof. He and Joan stood over their own ravaged little garden plot.

Down the line of roofs—each separated from the next by a low ridge, not even a foot high—her neighbors all cursed and shook their heads at their pillaged gardens.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Joan said. “They got Hector’s neighbor’s friend week before last. Only a matter of time.”

“I’m sorry about your garden, Morgan,” said Peter.

She knelt down and scooped the dirt back into her potato bucket.

“Selling it to the highest bidder as we speak,” Gene said.

One handful of soil felt heavy and dense. She poked through a tangle of roots and found a clump of small potatoes sheltered within.

“How do you like that, Morgan? The highest bidder eating your squash.”

“I guess they have to eat something.” When no one was looking, she brushed the dirt off the potatoes and tipped them discreetly into her bag.

“That building at the end of the block,” Gene said. “I’m telling you.”

“It’s their door,” Joan said. “Wide open day and night. Anyone can just march on in as they please.”

“Take that risk for yourself. Be my guest. But our roofs happen to be connected.”

Joan swept soil into a dustpan. “It’s just common decency.”

Morgan stacked firewood on the concave surface of a charred satellite dish. She ripped a few pages from the book; Designing Mobile User Interfaces, as it happened. And why shouldn’t it burn. There were no more user interfaces, let alone an internet from which to download an app. Certainly there was no need for her to decide on the placement of a button, a call to action, a user affordance—whatever that had ever meant—or a hamburger menu. There were no more hamburger menus. No more hamburgers, either. Her stomach grumbled.

She lit the pages with a match, tossed the potatoes and water into the pot, and held it over the flame. It was hot beside the fire, her arm grew tired quickly, and the smoke blew into her eyes.

On his roof, Peter squinted up at the sun. He still did that. She used to do it, too, but it made the fact of the matter no less inconceivable, no less far-fetched.

How could it be, after all, that every second she sat here on her stool, holding her pot over the fire, was the same second in which millions of tons of hydrogen fused, releasing such tremendous heat that after radiating over ninety million miles it just so happened to warm everything she knew of as the world to a very comfortable temperature. But it was too hot beside the fire.

How could that thing, without which even the scum on the surface of a pond was impossible, that thing so dependable that all of civilization was founded on its rise and fall—how could that thing, in a moment of improbable cosmic alignment, bring the world to its knees? Who had even heard of such a thing as a coronal mass ejection?

But now everyone considered themselves an expert on the subject, and the typical Brooklyn man would—and often did—take great satisfaction in explaining to you all about solar wind, the Carrington Event (“a burp next to 2/12”), high-voltage power transformer meltdown, and the diminished effect of geomagnetically induced currents at equatorial latitudes.

The potatoes were done. Actually they were still hard in the middle, but Morgan was starving, the water had boiled off, and she could spare no more patience or water toward the cooking of potatoes. They were bland, crunchy, and tasted of dirt. She ate them greedily.

“I might just go over there and give them a piece of my mind,” Gene said.

“I wish you would,” Joan said.

Peter paced back and forth on the short ridge between their roofs, craning his neck to see what might be in Morgan’s little pot. All at once she felt guilty for the way she had hidden the potatoes, for her covetous instinct.

Three little potatoes left. She would give them to Peter, and yet here she speared one with her fork and ate it in a bite. She would leave him two potatoes, and she ate another. The last potato was at her lips. She forced herself to take only a small bite, then, looking at it, convinced herself that one small, half-eaten potato was worse than no potato at all to the starving. She ate it with great satisfaction, and, afterwards, she could think of nothing but Daniel with his head stuffed between his bed pillows. She doused the fire.

A column of white smoke rose and drifted across the distant skyline of lower Manhattan. Marco had fired the oven. There was dough fermenting under a towel in the dark corner of her living room, and no garden to eat from for the next two months at least. Another distraction.

A day meant to be about Daniel, the sun hanging around 1 p.m., and she was no closer to him. The entire world had changed beyond recognition, and the only thing that remained the same was that she could not manage to give him her full attention.

She climbed back down the fire escape.

Only short stumps remained where once plane trees stretched their molting branches along either side of Quincy Street. In all of Bed-Stuy no tree was left standing, and now on a sunny July day there was no shade to be found on the crowded streets leading to Herbert Von King Park.

Morgan found a small crowd gathered around the entrance, reading the news and announcements hanging on the refrigerators that had been donated by parkside residents. On a dirty white refrigerator, a rainbow of alphabet magnets spelled “BWARE VEG THIEF ON HART,” and, already, just below it, “QUINCY 2.”

The purple “2” pinned to the refrigerator door a torn and wrinkled FEMA flyer, the kind that sometimes fell from the sky, and in the white space was scrawled a firsthand account of the USS Ronald Reagan departing Navy Yard yesterday morning with an escort of battleships.

“Loaded with fifty billion in bullion from the Federal Reserve, I heard,” Hector said. “Taking it down to Colombia and coming back with five high-voltage transformers.”

“No, it’s Brazil,” Kaden said. “And they asked for the gold by weight. Five hundred tons, and not a gram less.”

“I heard Indonesia, and they wouldn’t agree to trade us the transformers until we threatened to nuke ’em.”

“I heard they use enough electricity to power the whole city—no, it was the whole state—they use enough electricity to power the whole state just to make sure we can still nuke anybody we want whenever we want, and that’s the whole reason we still can’t flush our toilets.”

A long line extended from the far edge of the lawn to its center, where there stood a great round oven assembled in haste and desperation from clay, sand, brick, cement, and whatever else Marco had been able to get his hands on. It was nothing much to look at, but it baked a decent loaf without a watt of electricity.

Marco used to work at the slice shop on Tompkins, and now he could be counted on to fire the bread oven once or twice a week. He provided the wood, maintained the fire, and from morning to night baked as many loaves as the neighborhood had to bring him, all without a word of payment or recompense. No word was needed. Marco always left the park with a basket full of fresh vegetables, a jug of water, and once even a side of the deer that Samuel had shot and killed on Staten Island.

Morgan went straight up to Marco as he slid a loaf with the initials “AH” erupting in a craggy ridge from the crust into the basket of Aisha Harris, who looked down with adoration at her steaming bread.

“Line’s over there,” he said.

“I can’t wait in line today.” It’s Daniel’s birthday, Morgan wanted to say, but what did that mean to him. “The gardens on my block were all robbed last night.” She said it loud enough for those glaring at her from the front of the line to hear; her words would no doubt make it to the end of the line without her. “Have you heard?”

“Hm,” Marco said. “Come pick it up later, then.”

Before scoring “MF” into her dough she pinched off a small amount and gave it to Tony, who walked down the baking line with his bowl outstretched. He’d never learned to cultivate yeast from the air or make his own bread dough with the bags of FEMA flour. He’d gotten a late start on subsistence living.

Tony’s hardware store already had an inventory of diesel generators, gasoline cans, and even solar panels when the power went out. In the lawless weeks after 2/12, you could trade him an arm and a leg for a little charge, and long lines used to form outside his store.

Tony had hoarded guns, too, but he didn’t try to defend himself when the provisional military governor finally cracked down on profiteers, because he wasn’t there. The crackdown took place on an unseasonably warm April day, and that morning Tony had taken a motorcycle acquired in a recent barter out to Riis Beach, or so Morgan had heard.

He was still out on the Rockaways when his sons walked out of the hardware store with their hands above their heads, and the soldiers shot them dead, one after the other. They ransacked the store and took all the gas and guns, all the generators and solar panels. They left the bodies of his children where they lay, and these days Tony could be found walking up and down the oven line on baking days. At the end of the day, he would smush all the bits and pieces he had accumulated into a little loaf, and there would be no need to carve his initials into the dough.

Morgan pulled her bag more securely onto her shoulder and felt something jabbing into her side. The flashlight, she realized, groping at it through the canvas. She had not meant to bring it with her. It was really too valuable to carry unnecessarily. But she had a long enough walk ahead of her without turning back to her apartment now.

A mile down DeKalb, atop the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument in Fort Greene Park, someone waved makeshift semaphore flags attached to the handles of a broom and mop, and another someone looked intently southward through binoculars. The line for the only post office in Brooklyn stretched all the way down Myrtle Avenue, up Flatbush, to the entrance of the Brooklyn Federal Building, where a dozen soldiers with assault rifles hanging from their shoulders checked IDs and postal authorizations.

Those in line clutched letters written on FEMA flyers, on dollar bills, on the blank side of wrapping paper and old receipts, or on a page from a book, in between the lines. That’s how the first letter from Morgan’s parents had come, three months back—interlaced with the first few pages of Bleak House.

Morgan never knew what to write. With ink and paper such precious commodities, and with a half-ounce monthly limit on postage weight, nothing seemed good enough to put into writing.

There had only been one thing, really, she had had to write that first time, but even after three months she had not known how to say it, not to her parents. How did you say it? She had sat there all day, into the night, with the pen against a brown paper bag from the recycling bin, and when she woke the next morning she had nothing to show for it but a blotch of bleeding ink.

Wasn’t it silly to make such an ordeal of it? She was hardly the only one with a claim to grief, and in fact many had a far greater claim than herself. In the grand scheme of things … Well, in the grand scheme, it was nothing, really. The world careened around a vast ball of fusioning plasma, geomagnetically induced currents melted the coils inside power transformers, and in Central Park a platoon of soldiers dug a thousand-foot-wide trench for all the bodies. Against all that, what did it matter that Daniel died? That’s how she’d finally said it, in her letter: Daniel died.

The Brooklyn Bridge trembled underfoot as a convoy of six military supply trucks rumbled past, carrying sacks and sacks of post to the Federal Building, or else resupplying the FEMA outpost at the Navy Yard.

Between suspension cables Morgan watched a naval destroyer plow down the East River, patrolling the waters under which the city’s only live power cables ran. They ran all the way to Long Island City, to the Ravenswood Generating Station, where three months ago white clouds once again billowed forth from red and white striped smoke stacks. What celebrations there had been then, all throughout the city, from Pelham to Brighton Beach. And what riots, outside the power plant gates, when, three days later, still the lights had not come on, the toilets would not flush, no water flowed from the taps.

From the Manhattan-side abutment, Morgan looked down to where the underwater cable emerged from the East River and slumped onto land around Pier 17, into a reinforced concrete structure guarded by soldiers at all hours. From that structure, power lines ran throughout the blocks surrounding the Federal Reserve Bank. The entire area was enclosed in twelve-foot-high chain-link fences crowned in coils of barbed wire, and at every gate along the perimeter, soldiers manned stationary guns.

“The audacity,” Joan said every night on her roof, looking towards the Financial District, where FEMA’s operational headquarters glowed steadily, obscenely, against an expanse of flickering fires.

The walk up to 14th Street took Morgan not far from the place where Daniel had lived, in Chinatown. How many years had they both lived in the city, and not once had she visited him there. She lived alone, her apartment was nicer; he should come to her. And he had, once every fiscal quarter, perhaps, when she remembered to invite him for dinner.

She’d loved him, hadn’t she? How many times a day, unbidden, those memories—his little shoulders and legs sticking out from the pillows, a bird in silhouette beating its wings against the tent wall—would press so close, so sweet against her mind.

But there was a client to please, a promotion to chase, an apartment to clean, a friend’s wedding to celebrate, a first date with Sebastian, with Evan, with Raoul.

Daniel would always be there. Where exactly would he go when he had always been there, for twenty-six years? She always knew there would be time for him.

She had not meant to walk down his street, but when she looked up now, there his building stood. She had come here months ago, in May, when it finally seemed safe, but no one knew anything about a Daniel Foster. The people he had lived with were gone. The people living here now had not taken to the idea of letting in from the street a distraught woman crying about her brother so that she could search for his possessions, which, in all likelihood, had already been traded away or burned for fuel. All she had of him now were the photos on her phone. Funny to think that he was in there even now, locked away in stagnant ones and zeroes.

She retraced the steps of what must have been his most routine, his most ordinary day, walking from his apartment to his workplace, to the Whole Foods on 14th Street. Did he turn onto Bowery at Spring Street, she wondered, as she did now, to avoid the wreckage of the 737 that had fallen from the sky and made an impenetrable blackened gash of Nolita? From Bowery it was a straight shot up to his Whole Foods, now a food distribution center.

In the loading dock, volunteers unloaded large sacks of cornmeal from two military supply trucks. Armed soldiers stood guard. Morgan waited at a distance and watched as pallets of rice, flour, oats, and dirty, wilted vegetables were carried across the street. In Union Square Park the hungry amassed with bins, bowls, bags, and pillowcases.

“She’s with us,” Riley called out at last, and she now commanded such authority at the store where she had once stocked shelves that the soldiers stepped aside to let Morgan through. “Didn’t expect to see you for another couple of weeks.”

She didn’t know it was Daniel’s birthday. They’d been coworkers only six months. And yet with Daniel that was long enough to become fast friends; he was gentle, and it lowered the barriers people raised against strangers. But he was so timid that even on his birthday he would be the last to mention it. Surely, then, July seventeenth had never come up from the months of September to February.

“How good to see you,” Riley said, smiling broadly, clapping her on the shoulder. The stub that remained of Riley’s other arm rose, as though the phantom limb was gripping Morgan by her other shoulder.

She felt guilty now for coming here, to a place where so many toiled to feed the hungry; and she came here to take back her property. What better use could she put it to than the use it was put to here? And all she wanted was to turn on her phone and look at photos of Daniel. For that the produce must rot, the insulin spoil.

But she had squandered him long enough already, when he lived. When they lived only four miles apart and she’d barely made an effort to see him. Let the rotten produce, the spoiled insulin, be her dedication to him now. If someone went hungry, if some stranger died because their insulin was sitting in the July heat, then let it be proof of her love for him. Let her commit something of earthly consequence to him, even if—especially if—it was unreasonable.

“I was in the area,” she said.

A lie so obvious Riley did not bother entertaining it. “But of course you should have it back! I can’t believe you let us hold onto it for so long. How have you been managing? No, really, it’s too much now. You should have it back.”

“I’ll bring it back tomorrow. With a charge.”

“We can manage, really.”

“They should give you a generator already.”

“I was down there again to ask for one. You know they run the air conditioning in there, in the Stock Exchange. Nearly froze.”

Morgan waited inside the store while Riley went to extricate her power bank from the great tangle of cords and hundreds of batteries that together managed to run a single commercial refrigerator, the kind in which seven types of non-dairy milk had once been displayed.

The store’s sliding entrance doors had been manually pried open. Plywood and cardboard filled the openings where pane glass had once been set.

“Here,” Riley said.

From the look in Riley’s eyes, Morgan knew that she had seen her staring at the doors, and that she would now say something. Of all people it was Riley who had a right to say something. And still Morgan did not want to hear it.

“Thank you.” She took hold of her power bank.

There was a rushing and a throbbing in her head. Darkness closed in. She could barely see, but still she barreled towards the open doors. With every stumbled step she was further shunted from her own body, and at a short distance from herself it seemed no less inconceivable than the whole world hurtling around the ball of fusioning plasma, that this woman, who was no one but herself, should live through such times while the boy she had known since his first day should be gone utterly. The darkness now receded from her vision and in its retreat rang her head like a church bell.

“I’ll bring it back tomorrow!”

In Union Square Park, those in need filled their baskets and bags and bins with food. Morgan’s stomach grumbled. But her line was back across the river, in the Navy Yard. And apparently there would be a loaf of bread for her in Bed-Stuy. But she would need a vegetable, some nutrients.

There was burdock and sorrel to be picked in Central Park, and she knew a secret morel spot in the Ramble. But she did not have the time to go any further uptown, nor the strength; her legs ached terribly. She remembered, however, turning back downtown, the overgrown lawns along the East River, where edible weeds grew in abundance.

With the warm sun on the back of her neck and a pleasant breeze off the river, Morgan could cope with bitter dandelion greens, which she could not stand to eat, and with pokeweed, which was poisonous unless cooked. But there was plenty to be had. Barely two steps through the foot-high grasses before a patch of one or the other sprang forth. She made her way south along the river with her head bent, stooping here and there to pick a weed.

Looking up from her forage she saw the crowd thin as she worked her way toward the Williamsburg Bridge. Now, as the sun traced its most pleasant arc across the sky—6:30 or 7 p.m., it must be—the park emptied until it was just her, bending to pick some dandelion by the tennis courts, and someone walking in her direction. Walking far too intently in her direction.

An all-too-familiar pit formed in her stomach. She abandoned the dandelion. She turned on her heel. Two more men had approached her from the back. Guns tucked into their pants.

“Bag,” said the one behind her.

Bullets were as hard to come by as anything else. But it didn’t matter if they were loaded. What was she going to do, now, alone by the river, beside the bridge? Fight? Run?

“Now,” one of the ones in front of her said, laying his hand on the grip.

She shrugged the bag from her shoulder and held it out.

They emptied all the weeds she had collected right back onto the overgrown lawn, along with an empty water bottle, a matchbook, Designing Mobile User Interfaces, and her phone. But it was the heavy thud of the power bank against the ground that drew their attention. They grabbed it eagerly.

“What’s this?” one of them said. He pushed aside a few weeds with the tip of his shoe, revealing the hand-crank flashlight.

Not that, Morgan thought. Daniel and I used to play with that. We made hand puppets against the tent wall. We felt like God wielding the power to make light. Not that.

She said nothing. It was very easy to say and do nothing. The hardened survivalist had taken the reins from the thinking, speaking woman who was accustomed to exerting her will—however small it might be—on the world.

Her knees ached dully. She wondered how long she’d been kneeling here, in the overgrown grass. They’d been gone for some time.

Her hands still shook. Silly after everything, that her hands should shake. Hardly the first time she’d been robbed since 2/12, though she’d never had anything so valuable taken from her. Served her right for walking alone through the city with a bag of her most prized possessions.

All at once a snap of thunder cracked, as though the sky itself had split apart, unleashing sheets of rain. All day not a cloud in the sky and now it should rain. Had they waited to rob her until she was under the bridge, she might at least be dry now.

Everyone had looked up and seen rain clouds while she had kept her head down, looking for weeds, not seeing rain clouds, not seeing three men surround her from front and back. All because her garden had been stolen from her.

Day and night she had labored over that garden, carrying bucket after bucket of her food waste—of her own waste—down to her building’s backyard, turning it all in the dirt to work some nutrients back into the city soil. Every seed carefully germinated and gently buried. Many days she went thirsty so that her sprouts might be watered. Trimming and pruning, wiping aphids from each leaf. When the sun bore down too intensely, she constructed a shade shelter from chairs and twine and an old bedsheet.

So many hours of labor. Such fleeting moments of delight in the product of her work. And then in five minutes, it must have taken, the whole of it was uprooted and gone irrevocably.

Thieves stealing vegetables, stealing power banks and hand-crank flashlights. Sons shot and killed for the greed of their father. And how many hundreds gunned down outside the Ravenswood Generating Station for the crime of wanting to turn on a light and draw water from the tap; but the Stock Exchange must be air conditioned.

With both hands she tore up fistfuls of wet, overgrown grass, dirt still clinging to the roots. She kicked the ground. She kicked the pile of dandelion and pokeweed. She swung her bag again and again against the tennis court fence, shaking loose from the chain-link a trembling spray of rain.

You try to live with dignity, try to help others, but you cannot even help yourself before it is all ripped away from you. Dutifully you go to work, even when the night before curtains of scarlet and turquoise set the sky aglow, the power went out, and still it had not come back on. But dutifully you report to the store that pays you seventeen dollars an hour. And when the terrified masses pound against the sliding entrance doors, you do not turn away. You climb on a fruit display and assure them there is enough for everyone, and if only they could form a line so that it can be distributed fairly. You cry for fairness even as the glass panes shatter and the masses flood in, pushing you down in their hurry to grab bunches of ripe bananas. As they flee the desperation nipping at their heels, you are but one among many who fall underfoot. You are not so exceedingly lucky as those who lose only a limb or two. Step by step, your life is trampled out of you.

Now on the first of what will come to be a very great number of birthdays—a number greater than any age he ever managed to achieve—his very first friend could not even do his memory proper respect, because she could not really remember what he looked like, her only photos of him were on her phone, and her phone was dead.

Was she so different from the mob? Had she not hoarded? Just this morning had she not hoarded a handful of potatoes. A handful of small potatoes.

She knelt down to collect the sopping wet weeds she had kicked and thrown across the lawn. Besides everything else, she would need dinner tonight.

She put her phone back in her bag. She would take it to the FEMA outpost. She would beg them to charge it.

Torrential rain had done little to disperse the large crowd of surname Fs from the Navy Yard, she saw from the apex of the Williamsburg Bridge. She hurried to join them. But every step across the bridge was a tremendous effort. It was her bag. It was so inordinately heavy that the strap bore into her shoulder, she could barely shuffle one foot before the other, and she soon found herself hunched over the guardrail, gasping for air, unable to move another inch.

She did not realize that her hand had plunged into the bag until it emerged, clutching her phone. She stared down at the thing. Her scratched and dewy shadow stared back.

From such heights she could neither see nor hear the splash as it fell into the East River.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Sarah Davidson

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors