Totality – Kelly Erin Gray

November 29, 2024

This would be the last total eclipse of his lifetime. He had told this to his uninterested coworkers in the lunch breakroom, to impatient grocery store cashiers and baggers alike, and to the masked dental hygienist who had touched his open mouth so gently. He told everyone he met in the days leading up to it, and they would all always nod politely back. Some even made sounds of agreement, as if this would be their last too. After all, this was only the second time they could remember in all the years they had lived there that the path in space traced over their town. This is what they thought he meant, and he didn’t correct them.
        What Aaron didn’t say is that he had been chasing shadows all his life. He saw his first eclipse as a child in the backseat of his dad’s old pick-up as they carved up through the valley in ’69. His dad drove him and the little neighborhood girl they brought along with them. When the moon fit over the sun, they got to look straight on at the solar flares stretching like some cosmic aura around the hole in the sky. Though they had waited an hour for this moment, watching as the sun twisted away from them like an orange peel, Samantha wasn’t ready when it came. She grabbed Aaron’s hand back there in the backseat, and he pretended to be tougher than he really was for both their sakes. 
        And then, a decade later, he saw it as a timid boy of some seventeen years old, driving the same beaten down truck with his two friends in the backseat. They were racing to see totality then, and Samantha and Mark were touching knees as they passed eclipse glasses back and forth. Aaron caught that one mostly in glimpses through the reactions on their faces in the rearview mirror, until the day turned to dusk and he could lift his gaze too. He’d remember to buy three pairs next time, so none of them would have to be alone. 
        When he got older he went farther, meeting up with strangers he’d grow to recognize only by the bottom halves of their faces. In ’86, they drove across the country to where the road hit the Pacific and the blinking sun hung suspended over the open water, Mark and Samantha with him again. They told him they were dating on this trip from where they sat in the backseat, and Samantha tried and failed to set him up with some friend whose name Aaron could never remember. In ’88, he flew alone to Alaska to watch the open sky dim. There was no light pollution there, nothing standing in between him and the sun except the orbiting moon. He sent his friends a “wish you were here” style post card from an Anchorage truck stop that Samantha still kept on the fridge, even now. At their wedding two years later, Mark gave a teary eyed speech to Aaron thanking him as his best man for introducing them back at his old house on the dead end street. He never would have thought back then that that little neighborhood girl would mean more to him now than all of the stars do to the night sky, yet here they were. And there was Aaron. 
        Mark and Samantha would come when they could, but they couldn’t come to all. They’d call him up when partial eclipses would pass over them, but it wasn’t the same. In ’98, when the moon swung around them just right, he went to them. They had a house then, and a yard. A family to fill it. They watched in folding chairs from their backyard. When Samantha asked if he was seeing anyone, he was glad to have his eyes covered. What did he have then? And what did he have now? Shadows falling across his memory. 
        Mark died early this year. After the funeral procession, after the flowers gifted to her wilted into nothing more than a reminder, after it was just Samantha alone in the dark of her empty house, Aaron went to her. But now that he could, he couldn’t. And they both knew it. So they sat there on the lonely love seat, knees almost but not quite touching, and he tried to let the feeling pass him by. When he said this would be his last eclipse, he meant his own. It would happen again, but not for him.
        So the day the moon drew close, Aaron put his glasses down. All these years, and he had never looked right at the sun. It’s the same sun every day. All his life, it was there; but he never let himself feel its warmth. Now, he looked on. The more he stared, the more the white light reached out, caressing his face. It was so warm, and it was so easy. 
        When the moon covered the sun, a cold shadow fell over him. As he lifted his hands before him, they were cast in a ghostly blue. He couldn’t help but laugh. This is the part of the procession when everyone else in the path of totality would take off their glasses. Laughing still, he told himself they don’t know what they’re missing. The first light breaking out from behind the moon came in a dazzling density of white. The diamond ring effect. He always thought this had been a trick of the eye before from the way your eyes dilate in the dark. He didn’t know then, but he knew now. 
        The next day, a black hole opened up in his field of vision. The blind don’t see black, they simply don’t see. Light warped around it, everything being sucked up inside. But when he looked in the mirror, he could still catch a glimpse out of the corner of his eyes. Seared onto the bottom of his face: a smile.