Eclipses

By Jimmy Kindree

That grimace. That sudden laugh. That arch in your eyebrows and another check of the sky. Your dark eyes cringing into wrinkles as if, in that moment, you’d become older than me, and far wiser. Something sharp in my stomach broke open, just before you raised that cardboard box to your face.

That’s what I remember, us both fifteen, that bright June of the Creston eclipse. I remember the pageant of it, the things you could buy, cardboard glasses, printed T-shirts, the hotels all booked up for five counties around. The whole week before, you’d see families gathered out on their lawns, practicing sun-gazing, holding binoculars and magnifying glasses and mirrors to the sky, like seeing this would be worth the burned eyes.

And you and I, our green-painted nails, out on our bicycles all those heat-painted days, ringing Jack Dinham’s doorbell and running away, sucking bags of cheap candy, scrambling up through the trees in Meade Park, back where no one could hear us, our skirts snagging in brambles, the secret place where you laid out a blanket, touched my hand, then my face, like they weren’t mine, but yours. Your body was warmer than mine, like you had a fever, thirty years ago now, and those two cardboard helmets my mother had made us, that we took with us up through the forest, so that when the sun started to blacken you grimaced and laughed and held your helmet up, disappeared, the sun piercing through, so we could each see, each in our own box, the poker-chip moon sliding over, catching the cardboard’s ripples that I had never noticed before, all its fibers, and I felt for your hand, right when the moon locked into place.

Once, I told my daughter about you. She and I, we had driven to Tulsa to see the eclipse that was going to come at 12:42 on a Monday in October, a twelve-hour drive, a hotel in the city. We had one cardboard box that we’d share. The streets were packed. I realized I should have driven us back out of town, out to some hilltop, but it was too late. And my daughter, Laura, fifteen years old, she gave me a look that could have been your look, a grimace, a raising of eyebrows, like she was older and wiser than me, her mother’s mother, so that I laughed at her. “You can do the planning for the next eclipse,” I told her, and she said, in that brief kind of indignance that is all hers in this part of her life, “Yeah after you’re dead!” and I laughed, lay my arm on her shoulder.

She held the cardboard up to her face. We were surrounded by people, a throng, a stampede stopped still, a blessedly clear sky, a bright light, and I closed my eyes. “When I was your age,” I told Laura, “I thought my life was going to be different.” And I meant you. I thought your life was going to be different, too, than what it has been, your rising career, your months in treatment when we didn’t know what would happen, your recovery, all your anger, your year of travel, and now, what I heard from the people I know who still know you, that you have a wife. That’s all I was thinking.

I opened my eyes, and Laura’s head was inside that cardboard box, holding it up to the light-turning-dark like she was looking for something that should have been in it, like something was going to fall out of the box onto her face, so comically that I laughed all over again. I ducked down, inserted myself. “Mom.”

What changed, that day? Why did I never ask you what happened, even if I had guessed, why you laughed, why you grimaced, your eyes rippled, why in that moment you changed, why sunlight passes through a prick in a box, reveals the texture of cardboard and shifting spheres in the sky, or what we each felt, obscuring all of it, the things we never found there again?

About the Author

Jimmy Kindree (he/him) is a queer writer living and teaching in western Norway, originally from Minnesota. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Ecotone, Electric Literature, Raritan, The Hopkins Review, Chautauqua, Oyster River Pages, Pleiades, and elsewhere. He also spins yarn and knits with it, stargazes, makes pottery, cheese, and bread, and plays the banjo.