Sky Full of Elephants

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of bullying, racism, death by suicide, and suicidal ideation.

One morning, every white person in the United States walks into the closest body of water and drowns. The narrator refers to the sudden deaths by suicide as “the event” or “it.” The people still alive—Black people and people who don’t identify as white—feel a mix of emotions. Some are violent, others are unperturbed, and a few are nostalgic, watching predominately white movies from the past, like Ferris Buller’s Day Off (1986) and Titanic (1997).

Once the white people die, the Black people in prisons are free. The banks close, and capitalism stalls: chain grocery stores, online shopping, and gas stations become obsolete. The internet is not widely accessible, and neither are public libraries. Black people move into the empty houses, but they don’t throw out the personal items of the previous owners.

Charlie Brunton goes from prison to a two-story house in the Washington, D.C.-area suburbs of Maryland. As a child growing up in Michigan, he could fix all types of electronics and machines. Now, he teaches at Howard University, the historically black university in D.C. He tells his students that he wants to rebuild the nation’s electronic grid so that it has a solar foundation.