"Flashlight"

 

When the storm knocked out the power, Edna found herself thinking how glad she was that she had remembered to place the flashlight on the side table, which she happened to be sitting by at the time. Then, as soon she turned the flashlight on, she heard the tapping start inside the wall at her back. She was suddenly less glad. 

She swung the beam around until it landed on the wall. "Hey! Turn that thing off!" squeaked a voice somewhere behind the plaster.

Edna panicked and did what she was told.

"Seriously, what's the point of us fixing the lights, now, if you've already got a light to shine?" The voice was so small and light that Edna thought it would echo inside a teacup.

"Who's there?" she whispered.

"Oh, no one," came the voice. "Just give us a second, and..." Instantly, the power returned; the room was flooded with lamplight that drowned the flashlight's beam. 

"Hello?" Edna called, her own voice trembling. But no one replied. She turned in her chair and knocked on the wall, but no answer came. She sat for a bit after that, pondering what to do.

And then she unplugged the lamp.

"Buzzing"

 

One afternoon, a young girl thought about sticking her fingernail into an electrical socket, just to see how it would feel. Before she did it, however, she went online to see what other people had to say on the subject, and while she understood that reading other people's testimonies was hardly the same as having an experience of her own, she did decided, based on what she read, that she now possessed enough information that she didn't need to have that particular experience quite yet.

And it was an interesting thing: in the course of reading what people had written about electricity coursing through the body, she learned a bit about both electricity and the body--how each one worked and where each one came from, and why electrical impulses were in some cases good for the operations of the body and in other cases very, very bad. Soon her head was buzzing with Ideas. With those came lots of Questions. And as far as her afternoon chores were concerned, she ended up being about as interested in completing them as she would have been had she gone ahead and stuck her fingers in the socket anyway.