totality

This creative nonfiction piece came out of a prompt from one of Nina Hart's Creativity Chats.

We should be able to see the whole thing, our neighbors tell us when we bump into them on an evening walk. No light pollution to speak of out here, the whole sky uninterrupted over the water. 

Some early mornings, my husband walks out onto the beach to find the moon full and dripping into the grey velvet sea. Even now in the lavender twilight, I feel like we are living in a three-dimensional model of the Earth, like a teacher has just pulled away one quarter of the globe to reveal the layers — crust, mantle, core — and we walk under that bare sky, too tiny to be noticed by the students labeling their diagrams. 

“This is the kind you can’t look at, right?” our neighbor asks her husband and he rolls his eyes like they’ve been through this. This is how she talks, I think. I told my husband about it after the first evening we spent at their house, but he said he didn’t notice. Maybe it only stood out to me because I do the same thing: collect topics and anecdotes and observations to pad the silence with a pleasant slush of conversation. Light, it clusters, gathers like snow.

While our husbands talk about the shifting tide and coastal erosion, she asks me if I know about the Maya. Some, I tell her. She tells me about human sacrifices and celestial demons, her wide eyes hungry for my shock and tremble. 

I nod, change the subject to her children when a word straddles the line between the topics. I don’t say anything about how the Maya thought only the blood of the nobility was worthy of sacrifice, how there was evidence of blood-letting ceremonies rather than ritual murder, how animals and trees were considered divine and some temples offered sap to appease the gods. 

Overhead, the day moon hovers like the stubborn remains of a sale price sticker, dissolving in patches.

Later, my husband will ask me why I didn’t want to share what I knew and I won’t have an answer. It’s complicated. Layered. My feelings about being a stranger here encrust my general anxiety around saying anything to people I don’t know. The memories of classmates mocking me are perfectly preserved in the sediment and if I disturb that earth, crack the surface of one, I know their laughter and my shame will ooze out, spread rot like spring melt. 

And there’s my father ordering me never to correct him in front of others, never to share knowledge that he didn’t already posses and approve of, and my fear frozen in the ashfall of everything burnt up in his rage. 

And the thick sponge of my distrust, deceptively dense even with the hollow pockets where hope and bravery failed to grow.

Anxiety gleams, almost liquid in its shine, but it shatters under pressure and the splinters get everywhere, stabbing into the strata. The shards pierce deep, glitter with malice.

Uncertainty like a solid mist: When the Spanish invaded, they burned Mayan records, declaring the contents a superstitious, evil, godless. What survived are fragments, Mad Libs, Telephone.  

There are more, too many to label on a diagram without the handwriting colliding and blurring together, a forest of ghosts for my salted earth.

I say nothing, prepared only for silence or soliloquy.

Back at our rented house, I haul our meager belongings out of the corners and cabinets, searching what made it through our frantic downsizing for anything we can use to make an eclipse viewer. There’s so much we don’t need — three ceramic Art Deco Santa Claus ornaments, the goggles from my pre-pandemic resolution to swim at the gym pool twice a week, clothes we brought for being seen as we walked the beach (forgetting that we almost never want to be seen). So much and still nothing. 

The internet tells us we can watch the shadows. Everything comes with a warning, bold ink, caps lock: Do not look at the sun without certified solar filters. Do not look during the partial eclipse. I press my back to the wall behind me, waiting for the shadow to move. 

It’s thought that some Maya believed that it wasn’t the moon blocking the sun’s light in a solar eclipse, but a demon devouring the sun. In China, it was a dragon. Vikings theorized it was a pair of sky wolves. Vietnam, a toad. 

Across the world, people gathered outside under the disappearing light, banging drums and shields and empty buckets and cooking pots, shouting at the shadows spreading beneath their feet, trying to scare off the sun-eaters. 

I watch the ground, still golden, and a breeze tickles the back of my neck like the huffing breath of some creature whose appetite is whet by the smell of burning. I wonder what the Mayan records said about looking at the sun during the eclipse, if it was a curse or a gift to burn your retinas. To wake the next morning with the death of a god seared into your memory before you opened your eyes to darkness. 

Looking for some writing company? Come to a free co-write with me and connect with other creatives while you get some words out.