Totality

726 words

The sun was gone.

In its place was a negative of it - a bright white ring of light surrounding the hole where it used to shine. I stepped closer and stretched up my hand like I might be able to touch it. The sky all around had turned twilight dark with a golden glow along the entire horizon. Stars glittered through the gloom.

People were gasping in delight and wonder,. Children were laughing. Someone set off a sparkler fountain. The lights flashed and fizzed in the corner of my vision, but I could not take my eyes off the place where the sun should be. That gaping hole into the universe. The sun was still there. I knew that. But even in the few seconds it had been obscured so far, the temperature had dropped palpably. It felt like it was never coming back.

I stepped forward again, feeling like I was getting closer, but of course that was impossible. My stretched out hand met something cool that shimmered in the air before me. I drew my hand back and focused not on the missing sun but what was happening feet in front of me.

We had come to view the eclipse at the dead center of the line of totality where complete coverage would last the longest: 2 full minutes and 40 seconds.

The middle of the path of totality bisected the crater we were in, an invisible line of darkness. Except that the line was no longer invisible.

People’s cries of delight were changing pitch, turning higher and more frightened. The mist before me extended in a perfectly straight line down the middle of the crater, dividing those on one half from the other. It swirled like oil on the surface of a puddle, trapped in a flat plane perpendicular to the ground, stretching high into the syk - a wall stretching from us to the moon.

I stretched my hand out again.

“Get away!”

“What is it?”

“Do you see that?”

A child started to cry.

My hand met no resistance, going through the mist with nothing more than a cool sensation like reaching into a refrigerator.

“Don’t touch it!”

“Is it a solar flare?”

“No one said this would happen!”

On the other side of the mist, I could see people I didn’t recognize. More than the people who had come with us. Strangers. New comers. They looked different somehow.

One of them, a little girl with short hair a missing tooth, smiled at me and held out her hand for me to take it.

“Are you filming this?”

“I’m not the only one seeing this, right?”

“Oh. My. Gosh!”

The other side of the mist looked darker somehow. Not night time. But off, like when a tornado is coming and you can’t place what’s different about the light. The girl with the missing tooth came right up to me and took my extended hand. Her’s was warm and solid. I let her pull me the rest of the way through the mist, the coolness brushing my arms and cheeks and finally the back of my neck as I passed through.

The sounds around me became muffled, like I had water in my ears.

“What’s happening?”

“Isn’t it amazing!”

“Nobody go near it!”

The girl grinned wider and swung our joined hands back and forth, looking up at the moon again. It wasn’t black, but a deep colorless blue. White hot light streaked out from behind it.

As we watched, the sun flashed into existence again, first a flicker and then a flame. I reached for my eclipse glasses and put them in place just as the glare overtook the moon once more. The darkness lifted. The sliver of sun I could see with the glasses on grew back. The eerie chill subsided.

I realized my hand was empty and looked down, lifting the glasses away from my eyes to see the rest of the world. The girl was gone. Everyone else had their dark glasses back on, blind to everything but the sun. I looked them over, wondering where she had gone. But all the people I’d seen - the newcomers, the strangers - had vanished. It was only us left.

I closed my empty hand, feeling like I had lost something important. Putting my glasses in place, I looked back up at the sun, glad that it at least had come back.