DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Eclipse

                Hannah was outside a lot that summer.  Crossing over the highway bridge always gave her a high that couldn’t be beat.  Her uncle and his construction company that works for the city had just built a fence that stretched, like an incomplete arch, high over her head.  Last morning on her walk to summer school a line of pigeons was settled on the top rim of the new fence.  The fence was painted fire-engine red, and it stood out brightly from everything else near it, and at night it glowed like it was on fire.

                That night Hannah wanted to see the lunar eclipse.  It was supposed to start at 12:15am and last around three and a half hours.  The last time she had seen one it was winter, and it was just after a snow storm had passed. Her parents told her and her brother, Dan, to stay in and watch it from the den window because it was to take place so late at night, but they really wanted to see it from outside, so they sneaked out of the house and walked to the field behind the garage to see it.  There was a foot of snow on the ground, but Hannah and Dan trekked the hundred or so feet and found a spot of bare grass under the oak tree.  They spread out the quilt their Great Aunt Susan had passed down to her mother.  It was more than fifty years old, and her Great Aunt had made it when she was a girl growing up in Germany.  The sky sparkled even though there was an absence of stars; the streetlights that lined the streets shimmered like halos; one after another, taller than any of the trees or houses nearby. 

                The eclipse lasted a little over three hours, but it seemed more like fifteen minutes.  At the beginning of the eclipse Dan ran back to the house to bring back some hot cocoa.  Hannah laid down on the quilt and watched as a small part of the moon disappeared, fading from bright white to black.  Hannah stared as the moon slowly began to disappear, and within a few minutes, she fell asleep.  The cold biting at her bare cheeks woke her up.  She sat up quickly as soon as she realized that she was still outside, just to find her brother staring up at the sky, fixed in a trance.  He was sitting next to her, turned to the side so that Hannah could only see the right side of his face.  He looked fascinated, like the blue of his eyes stretched out over the black, like something out of a cartoon.  Hannah looked up to see half of the moon gone, and became disinterested and fell asleep again.  What seemed like five minutes later, Hannah woke up again to find her brother shaking her shoulder.  “It’s over,” he said, “We have to go inside before Mom and Dad find out that we snuck out.”

 

                That summer night Hannah’s parents told her she could go watch the eclipse from the outside if she was only gone for an hour.  Hannah agreed to this, even though she knew she would be gone for longer.  She packed her great aunt’s quilt, a bottle of hot cocoa, and some crackers in the duffel bag she used for basketball.  She left the house in an excited hurry, tip-toing past her brother’s bedroom, so as not to wake him up.  He had finals at his community college the next day, so he needed his rest, and couldn’t go with her.  He had told her to take pictures, so Hannah snatched her IPhone that rested on the end table and shoved it in the right back pocket of her jeans.  She shut the door gently, walked down the steps of her porch, and turned right, walking past her neighbor’s rose bush that grew on the corner of the block.

 

                She took her IPhone out of her pocket and popped her earphones in her ears.  She had left early and still had about half an hour before the eclipse, so she decided to take the long way, past the elementary school and the soccer field, and then past the second bridge and the open field where the tree with the hawk’s nest was.  Hannah sat down on the bench that was parallel to the side street she had been walking down to tie her shoe.  She stooped over to her left to double-knot her Nike.  She sat up to see a car passing by.  Her music was on as loud as it would go, but looking up to the still portrait of the empty field, she wondered what the quiet of the night would sound like, so she pulled off her ear phones and shoves her IPhone in the side pocket of her bag. 

 

                The space around the bench that she sat was etched in shadows of grey and dark blue, along with yellow from the light emitting from the streetlights.  She felt the warmth of the summer night penetrating her skin, and she sat with the silence that surrounded the streets and field in front of her.  She sat for a few minutes, taking in the cool breeze that held her in her solidarity.  Ahead of Hannah, to the right of her, was a sewer that stretched on a ninety-degree angle over the curb and street.  The fire hydrant ahead of it was slowly leaking water that drained into the sewer, slowly, methodically, peacefully, and in the dark of the night, where the edges of the stream of the water glowed under the moonlight, beautifully.  Hannah stared as the stream ran repeatedly from one place to the other.  Hannah drew a trance; she couldn’t let go of the calm she got from watching the water drain, because it seemed to promise to never end, to stay with her forever, as long as she stayed with it.  She remained like this for what seemed eternities, until a loud sound broke her concentration and made her look up.

 

                Two side streets ahead of her, in a grassy field that lie in front of the busy street that intersected with another, about two blocks in front of her and behind several trees, she saw two figures, who, looking closer, she realized where a boy and a girl around her age.  She could barely see them through the branches that swayed in the wind, and she wondered if they could see her.  She couldn’t recognize their faces but she could see that the boy stood a few inches taller than the girl.  He wore a baseball cap that she took off and put on her own head backwards.   Hannah sat and watched as the girl stood up on her toes and kissed the boy on the forehead.  She couldn’t make out their faces, but she could see the girl’s long curly hair that fell over her shoulders, and the boy’s short hair that the girl combed her fingers through.  The girl turned around and leaned into the boy, and he picked her up with his arms around her and put her back down.  Hannah could hear the girl’s laughter echo throughout the empty air.  Hannah felt a pang of jealousy go through her, and at that moment she wished she had a boyfriend.  All she had at that moment was the promise of the beauty of the eclipse.

 

                Hannah suddenly felt embarrassed watching two people she didn’t know, so she stood up, picked up her bag, and started walking toward the soccer field.  She put her earphones back on and picked Keane from her playlist.  She looked up and saw that the eclipse had already begun, so she picked a spot on the soccer field, spread out her quilt on the ground, and sat to stare up at the partially empty moon that only her mind allowed her to understand was once a full circle.  The disparity of black and white was so contrasting that she couldn’t believe that the moon was separate from what caused the shadow fall over it.  The only thing that she trusted of the sight was the calm that she felt from the breeze, and the peace she felt from being allowed to watch the ying meet with the yang.

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.