When I remained silent I heard him mutter “whatever.” From his footsteps I could tell he was turning around and starting down the stairs.

“Bernie!” I yelled.

“Yeah,” he yelled back.

“Thanks,” I said.

And he left.

I went to the bathroom and dry-heaved. I sat next to the toilet for a few minutes, thrown back into my raw Bonnie self, that bear trap I could not seem to escape completely.

I had to get hold of myself. I splashed my face with cold water and looked at myself in the mirror, and was reassured by what I saw there. I was blue-eyed Jack Tripper. I was strong.

Bernie had said a storm, but he might as well have told me a bomb was coming. Hearing his voice felt like an explosive intrusion all by itself, but a storm could do large-scale damage, knock out windows, fuck the plumbing, do things that were beyond my power to fix. Though I hated Bernie in that moment, and wanted to believe that he was an overreacting, contract-breaching twat, a more practical part of me remembered the small radio I had in my bedroom, and reluctantly I sought it out. Prerecorded programs specific to the seventies and eighties had been inserted into it via a microchip, but it still worked as a regular radio. At first there was only static, even on the emergency broadcast channel. However, as I flipped stations I heard the barest hint of a cheerful commercial jingle. Music followed, and then a DJ came on with obnoxious chatter about the latest disgraced celebrity, interspersed with audio clips of a cooing woman getting spanked.

Aha! Everything was fine. Nothing championed the status quo like smug, shock-jock comedians. I turned off the radio and returned it to its shelf, idly pondering whether Jack, Janet, or Chrissy feared thunderstorms. My mother had always enjoyed them. She would stand at the window and watch while they rolled in, smiling to herself, as if she and the clouds shared a secret.

I shook my head as if to shake the memory away. Still thinking like Bonnie, I see, I scolded myself. I straightened my shoulders and returned to the kitchen. Determined to put the end of my world out of my mind, I resumed chopping vegetables, my hand quivering only slightly. Outside, the sky turned a sick gray.

Two hours later I was feeling better and making a roux. The sun had set, and the kitchen was shining its warmth around me, the heat from the stove shimmering the air. Fifteen minutes earlier Chrissy and Janet had arrived home and called hello to me through the kitchen door, and I was now half listening to the domestic sounds of a Thursday evening—the distant chatter of my roommates, a toilet flush, a bedroom door opening and closing, a gentle rumble of thunder outside, the low buzz of the television sputtering to life—when a terrific BOOM split the air, and something flashed faintly in the sky, and the lights around me flickered and then died, and the refrigerator shut off with a hard thump, and the stove was gone, too, and with this sudden change the sounds of my roommates ceased as if they were pinched into nothingness, and I was utterly alone.