Read it all. Good on many levels. Why did the electric go out? Revealed in later chapters but maybe an EMP strike, a few of them. The Trigger Effect was a decent movie where the power just goes out
Take away electricity and all modern civilization collapses. Now I will have to think this way
If the power goes out, we will probably never know the real reason why. Without any news reports, it will just be rumors passed from person to person.
EMP? Solar flares? Cyber war? Hackers? A bank crisis that collapses the global financial system? Nobody will even know why it happened, so I don’t focus much on the reason in that short story. The narrator doesn’t know why.
But for sure, we all need to make personal preparations, and strive to make our local power grids as robust and independent as possible, to try to head off cascading grid failures.
If the power goes out for even a week, our cities will all explode, and then humpty dumpty will be too smashed up to fix.