Someone on the local news said it was tradition.
“During the total eclipse, close your eyes, and whisper a desire you’ve never told a soul.”
I remember the anchor failing to pass off the strange intensity of the reporter offering the idea.
“We’re in the path of totality, Pam,” the reporter said.
Awkward silence, a beat before the camera changed to the weatherman. Usually, the morning news played on repeat every hour. I left it on to see if they’d show the eclipse guy again. Couldn’t remember his name. Someone else covered the eclipse segment later. No traditions were mentioned.
That was like a month ago, and I haven’t seen him since. Poor guy probably lost his job over what I thought was a bad joke. One bad joke. That’s all it took. He had my sympathy. One bad choice of words. That’s how I ended up in my predicament.
Lying to myself again. The bad decision was being an alcoholic, and being one had been years, decades in the making, and it hadn’t stopped. How could it ever? I’ve no idea how people quit. It’s all I think about. There’s nothing better or worse, more essential, more devastating than that first drink of the day.
I’d been good at hiding it. Finding everything so interesting, expressing curiosity outdoors gave me all the reasons I needed to be away from home and family.
That’s why I was outside during the eclipse, down at the beach, with hundreds of others. A once in a lifetime crossing of two heavenly bodies was nothing more than an excuse to drink.
So many years professing a passion for the stars. All an excuse to isolate. I don’t give a shit about space. Frankly, it freaks me out.
“Clive?” my wife, Claudia, called from the kitchen. “It’s past two. Didn’t you want to be down at the beach by now?”
I feigned deep distraction with Jules, our four-year-old daughter. We were playing with Paw Patrol toys as if they were battling Pokemon.
“Marshall,” I said, “I choose you!”
Jules giggled with delight, and I felt an awful guilt. She didn’t know I was faking, playing up a profound interest in her so I seemed like a good father, and not too eager to be rid of everyone.
“Clive?! You’ll miss it!” Julia came in with my jacket. “Supposed to get cold when the sun is totally covered.”
I snuck a kiss because I wouldn’t be able to later. She might smell the booze. “Dark too. Dark as night.” I’d done my research. “I’ll be back in a few.”
“Daddy,” Jules warbled. She held up the toys I had so readily abandoned.
“Daddy needs to go out,” Claudia said.
“Me too,” the four-year-old reasonably objected.
“Too dangerous, sweetheart,” I said, giving her a big, sweeping hug that made her laugh. I passed her to Claudia and hit the street.
One stop at the stump in the woods, where I’d left a water bottle full of vodka, and I was buzzed before my sole found sand.
There were hundreds of people there already. Some looked vaguely familiar. I worried they might be neighbors. Claudia talked with neighbors sometimes.
I moved to the back of the crowd.
There were a lot of families with kids the same age or younger than Jules. They wore cardboard eclipse glasses with elastics to prevent easy removal.
I’d played up the danger, and Claudia’s general anxiety made her agree to close the curtains and stay inside all day. Later, I’d probably say something about how a bunch of idiots - bad parents - had brought their kids out to stare at the sun.
I drank. I drank and watched the families, the fathers, with their children, happy and enthusiastic in a shared experience.
Each moment with my family, or at work, when I wasn’t drinking, felt like treading water. Relief, a peaceful, lonely island, came from the bottle. For a long time, I thought the drink made normal moments hard for me.
Didn’t turn out to be that at all. During a few months of difficult sobriety, no magic entered my interactions with Claudia and Jules. I still had to act like I cared, like I wasn’t thinking about running to the LCBO.
I do care. That’s the awful thing. I care about my family so damn much. There’s the horror of addiction.
Half the vodka had made its way into my bloodstream. The moment of obfuscation approached. Glasses were adjusted. People stood a little straighter as if god himself might show up.
I sat against an embankment with the bottle on my knee. In all my theater about the moment, I had neglected a crucial prop.
A partial eclipse would burn my eyes. I had no special cardboard glasses or protective apparatus of any kind. If Claudia saw me now, she’d know. I am nothing but a lie.
The reporter came to mind as the sky darkened. His tradition was probably just made up, but all of them are, aren’t they?
I closed my eyes and felt the warm air change to cold. I caught a whiff of sunscreen from a hissing can nearby. Who would bother with that now?
Unbelievable silence would have been mine if not for the beating pulse within my ears.
“I want to die,” I confessed in a whisper.
Another voice spoke. “You should die.”
My eyes snapped open. It was too dark on the beach. Closing my eyes had been an unnecessary part of the supposed eclipse tradition. Throngs of people had moved into my space as if backing away from the blotted sun. It could have been any one of a dozen people who’d whispered.
“Hey,” I said.
The sky held their attention.
“Which one of you said that to me?”
Still, nobody looked. Families clung to one another in the atypical night. The scientific prediction of this moment, and all the expert conjecture about it failed to relate the subtle fear of an unusual darkness. Primal brains too slow to adapt to constant change could not accept the transition of heavenly bodies as anything else but a threat.
The voice had no identifiable gender. Anger blossomed from fear as I searched the crowd. All of them had become goggled shades with no interest in me. I figured it must have been some asshole, maybe another drunk.
But then the minutes dragged. Had I really cared about space stuff, I might have known how long the total eclipse would last. I drank and put my back into the sand embankment firmly. I’d keep my eyes level. No one would sneak up on me.
I watched them gradually lose interest in the endless hole. The moon stopped moving. Even I knew that wasn’t possible. It’d gotten cold, but only now did I feel a shiver.
Quiet murmurs rippled through the crowd. They began to turn. Their eyes looked like the eclipse. Hundreds of black holes over occasional simmering extensions at the rim hungered. It was me. I was the one. My sins had caused it. Only my death would end the darkness.
“You should die,” a little girl, younger than Jules, said, touching my hand before digging her fingernails in with surprising strength. I backed into the embankment, sand filling my shoes as I scrambled.
Something hard hit the side of my neck. I dropped the vodka as I staggered. A rock whizzed by my head and thudded into the packed dirt.
“You should die,” a woman seethed, crouched and naked. Her teeth seized a hunk of my forearm, severing the flesh like melted butter. I screamed and leapt for a clutch of roots sticking from the highest edge of the embankment. Hands grabbed my ankle, and I kicked someone, or something, in the face, but they wouldn’t let go.
“You should die, you should die,” the masses chanted. Their voices were so clear because the earth had muted herself. The waves of the lake had stopped, and the air felt still, stuffy, like the inside of an elevator with too many passengers.
I kicked and fought until free. They gathered below the ledge. Their faces were so sweaty, it looked like tears coming from their blackhole eyes. Yet, the air got colder, wintry without snow.
“You should die, you should die.” The discordant chorus unified into a single voice, the very one I had heard when I’d closed my eyes and confessed during the totality.
“I don’t want to die!” I screamed.
But they wouldn’t stop. “You should die, you should die, you should die…”
“No!” I ran across the grass to a muddy path curving around a playground, taking a steep hill to the street above like an animal, all fours, dirt filling my fingernails as I frantically clawed for safety. They swarmed around the embankment, sprinting, yet never giving up the chant.
I hesitated by the wooden fence. They were so fast. How could I possibly keep going? A stick bounced off my chest, the slight pain enough to get me moving. More than a little drunk, but used to the feeling, I leapt the fence, recovered my footing and booked it toward the woods.
I had to get home. I had to find Claudia and Jules. If anything had happened to them…
The moon would not move. I ran and the darkness followed. Stumbling through the forest without getting totally lost was only possible because the chant and those people continued their pursuit.
“You should die…”
One had gotten in front of me. We collided. He bit my cheek, and when I pushed him back, he rebounded with a punch that made my vision sparkle.
I managed to grab hold of his shoulders. I kept hitting him and didn’t stop until the sound of several breaking sticks and branches suggested the predators had at last arrived. I’d flattened his face. Instead of two cavernous sockets, I’d eclipsed his features with blood.
It looked a little like a neighbor. Christ, I knew this guy: Matt, a retired science teacher. He’d offered me his lawn mower when we first moved into the neighborhood, but I’d refused.
I liked the old manual one. Kept me outside longer.
“Jesus Christ,” I said to his corpse, “what the fuck is happening?”
“You should die, you should die…”
No time to think about it. I wept while I ran the rest of the way home, and then I wept some more. They waited on the lawn, and their eyes were the same as everybody else’s.
“You should die,” they said together. Then they came. Impossibly, Jules outpaced Claudia and leapt. I ducked, and her four-year-old body sailed overhead, landing in a coiled ball and springing into the air with inhuman dexterity.
She landed on her feet. “You should die.”
“Stop saying that!”
Claudia’s fingers tangled into my hair and pulled, driving my nose into her knee, popping cartilage, freeing blood in a steady drip. My wife had never been in a fight.
Sprawled out on the road, Jules tried to tear into my forehead, painfully ineffectual. She smelled like a fresh diaper. Claudia must have just changed her before all this…
I cried so hard and shrieked. It took everything left to thrust her off as Claudia narrowly missed with a kick meant for my head. I scrambled away and the rest of them came like the flood from the woods around the corner.
“You should die, you should die.” My family joined the mob. There were no running cars on the road, only more people with holes for eyes. All of them seemed to know me because they perked up, suggested dying, and then fiercely tried to make that happen.
Covered in sweat, I emerged at the crossroads outside our part of Bridal Veil Lake.
Straight ahead led to the more populated part of town, where the majority of service people for the tourist industry lived. Maybe someone there could help me.
Left would take me to a dead end and a crescent path back home and certain death. It seemed like the right way to go. If only the last road didn’t lead directly to the liquor store I knew so well.
The security features are a mixture of classic sheet metal and modern technological sophistication. I could tell you that’s why I went there, but we’d both know I was lying.
Far behind, the mantra faded to a murmur. Shocked to numbness, I walked on wobbly legs, and worried I might pass out.
Claudia and Jules came from the last side street before the liquor store parking lot. They were silent and sad, and with their eyes covered, I realized there had always been tension and stress in their expressions.
Maybe they didn’t know about the drinking specifically, but they’d sensed something wrong, the thing that drove me away from them.
“I’m sorry,” I sais, though I can’t be sure they understood. “I’m going in there now.” I pointed to the store behind them.
“You should die,” Claudia said bitterly.
I nodded. “That’s the plan. But slowly, on my own terms. I’m too scared to let you take me.” Moving got them going too. I don’t think I can type out the details of what came next.
Vicious and cruel, I did my best to forget who they were, and what they’d been. I sicken at the thought of how easy this detachment was achieved. Relief and further aid lay just beyond them in thousands of pretty bottles. I just had to get there.
Our battle seemed so quiet under the eclipse, full of grunts and gasps and eventual tormented agony on their part.
I’d found a rusty length of rebar nestled in the gravel beside a barricade. Until then, I’d been losing. After, one lay dead and the other, bloodied but alive, watched through the window while the horde raced up behind her.
They didn’t try to get inside, and her eyes lost interest. She turned away. I closed the sheet metal door with a controller I’d seen an employee use before. Thankfully, nobody was inside.
Sealed in, I drank until I passed out on the floor. Sadly, I didn’t die, and, despite my best efforts, continue to live inside with the liquor.
I haven’t been outside in a week. I’m afraid to look. It’s still cold, so I don’t think the eclipse has ended or will ever end, but that’s not why I don’t want to look. She’s out there. I know it. Right where I killed her.
Few things work in this place except the toilets and the internet. I tried calling 911. The operator had a good suggestion. I’m sure you can guess what it was.
“You should die.”
I swore at her and hung up.
Searching the internet for news proved futile. Nothing seems to be amiss. For the rest of the world, the eclipse has concluded as expected: Darkness for some minutes and then nothing but a few jokes about those expecting the rapture.
People post pictures of their pets and children on reddit. Donald Trump’s criminal trial has begun. The sun and the moon went on their merry ways.
Why is it eternally dark where I am?
Even the local news in Bridal Veil Lake hasn’t mentioned anything about the eclipse again, except that some fool lit a fire in the gorge during it and burnt down an old tree.
I’m not in my hometown anymore. I get it. I’m somewhere else. I can’t get over this claustrophobic feeling. Worse, I can’t be certain the family that attacked me, that I attacked, aren’t horrible copies.
I’m afraid they are. I’m afraid they aren’t.
There are bags of kettle cooked chips with the wine. I sleep on a couch in a break room. In an office the size of a closet, I found a charger for my phone. My blanket is made of reusable bags. As for the booze, there’s more than anyone could drink in an unhealthy lifetime.
Just now, as I finish typing this up, I understand at last:
I am finally on the island I thought I wanted.
And all I can think about is leaping into the sea.