Onset
All afternoon the sun has been trying to impersonate itself, a white disk shining through the white Oregon sky. But now, still high above the trees, it’s starting to vanish.
I can see this through the glacier goggles that I hold over my sunglasses as I stand chest-deep in the hot springs pool alongside the McKenzie River. Even when I briefly lift both glasses, my back to blue tiles, I can see that a dimmer switch has been turned in the sky. Surely this is the eclipse I’ve been reading about for days.
But nobody else seems to have noticed.
Steam slides over the water. In the middle of the pool, a tattooed couple is waltzing with two small boys who smile and squirm in their arms. The boys glow less pink, I notice, by the minute. The family floats and turns with the grace of balloon animals, even as the rushing, silver-tint river darkens.
Now, the sun’s a holy crescent. Soon, it might disappear forever, replaced by the shadow boulder of the moon rising within it, rising as water does when it fills a well beneath my bed at night. Recently, no matter where I’m sleeping, water comes up through the bedroom floor and purls around the legs of my bed, the cold breathing up at me for hours. What else can explain the wet sand in my chest when I wake up?
Just to my right, a green-eyed woman is trading divorce stories with a kind-looking man who drifted next to her an hour ago. They’ve been laughing and nodding, having gone through something together and apart.
But neither glances even once at the sky–or at the forest of immense trees across the river, where shadows are deepening, and animals that haven’t walked the Earth since the invention of fire are beginning to stir.
