The first thing Spencer heard when he woke up was the oxygen concentrator.
That wasn't unusual. It was the new normal for their house, had been for eight months — a steady, rhythmic hum running underneath everything, a different sound of life that refused to give up. He'd read once that people who lived near train tracks stopped hearing the trains after a while. He hadn't stopped hearing the concentrator. He was fairly sure he never would.
He lay on his back and did the thing he did every morning before committing to being awake: the inventory. Nana's pillbox was sorted, Monday through Sunday — he'd done it last night. The backup tank in the hall closet read full as of yesterday. Groceries could wait until tomorrow when he got off work; he needed to pick up a few cans of the low-sodium soup she'd eat without comment and a few of the regular kind she'd eat while making her feelings about sodium restrictions known to the room at large.
All while commenting that her GP was a quack.
But today was more special than usual! The eclipse!
Spencer sat up from his bed; his eyes went to the calendar on the wall without asking a spark of excitement enter his bright green eyes. Solar Eclipse! — circled twice in red, the way he'd marked it back in January with the enthusiasm of a man who hoped the universe would grant him this one thing after a long line of tragedy. The path of totality passed close enough to Athens that a clear sky would give him something real. He'd been carrying the date around for months, planning how he would spend the day with the other citizens of Athens who decided to celebrate the astronomical phenomenon.
He had the day off. He'd arranged it three weeks ago. He'd confirmed it twice.
But of course, his phone rang.
He looked at the ringing piece of technology like it insulted his dog; he already knew what was on the other end of the call and was taking a last breath of the version of the day that hadn’t had a chance to start. Then he answered.
"Spencer." Marcus didn't say good morning. Marcus had never once said good morning. "I need you in. Kowalski's a no-show."
"It's my day off, Marcus."
"I scheduled it three weeks ago."
"And Kowalski scheduled himself to show up, but he didn’t, so here we both are." Something hit a desk on the other end, set down hard. "I need a body on that floor, and you're the most reliable one I've got. Most people would take that as a compliment."
Spencer pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose. Through the window, the early light was a little more golden than the season called for, a little more present, like the universe creating a new color just for today. He'd planned to spend the whole day in it.
"The eclipse is today," he said. He didn't know why he said it. Marcus was not a man you appealed to with astronomy.
"Half shift. Out by two." A pause that wasn't a pause so much as a loading screen. "Don't make me call somebody else and have the conversation about reliability during your next review, Spencer."
The word was right there. One syllable. Two letters. Children managed it before they could walk. Spencer looked at the red circle on the calendar and listened to himself say, "I'll be there by eight." Damn it, and he hung up before he could hear whatever Marcus did instead of saying thank you.
He sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, running the conversation back the way he always did — locating the exact spots where a different man would have said the thing, cataloging them, filing the catalog where he filed all the others. It was a large file.
Then he got up and went to check on his Nana, because the day wasn't going to caretake itself.
Elenore Driscoll was already awake, which meant she'd been awake a while, which also meant the night had been another long one where he couldn’t help. Guilt gnawed at his chest as he watched her propped against her pillows, the same position he saw her in before bed. The TV murmured some drama movie he’s pretty sure she’s watched several time before.
"Morning," he said from the doorway.
She turned her head, and her familiar green eyes did their pass over him, top to bottom, ten seconds, before settling on his face. "You look like somebody ran over your bicycle."
She made a sound that conveyed her entire opinion of Marcus, but her old-fashioned southern upbringing wouldn’t allow her to say it out loud. "Your day off."
"Half shift. Back by two." He came in and started the routine his hands knew without supervision — concentrator readings, tubing, check the ventilator she wore when sleeping, the little cup of morning pills in their proper order. "How was the night?"
"Manageable," she revised, which was their treaty term for bad but survived. "The machine did its beeping again around three."
He looked at the concentrator. It hummed back, innocent. "The filter's ordered along with a new mask. Should be here in a couple of days."
"Assuming they actually placed the order when you called," she said, dry as a creek bed in August, and took her pills all at once like they personally offended her. Spencer grimaced at the action, never able to do that himself.
He sat in the chair beside the bed while she did it — the chair had a Spencer-shaped dent in it at this point — and looked, because he always looked, at the framed photo on the side table. His mother and his sister, laughing at something off-camera, Fourth of July light all over them. He knew the photo well enough to see it with his eyes shut. He looked anyway. Some things you visited.
"You were looking forward to that eclipse," Elenore said, watching him over the rim of her water glass.
"There'll be another one."
"The next one you can see from Georgia is —"
"I know when it is." Gently. "It's fine, Nana. It's just the moon covering the sun."
She set the glass down and gave him the look she gave a younger him when he wasn’t following her orders. "Glenda's at nine," she said instead. "So you can stop doing the math about leaving me alone. I can hear you doing it from here."
"You were carrying the one." She patted his hand, once, brisk, the gesture she used when affection needed to move fast before it got noticed. "Go to work. Come home by two. And Spencer—" She waited until he was looking at her properly. "Look up once in a while today. Even from inside, you can tell."
He considered explaining that you could not, in fact, tell from inside a manufacturing plant with no skylights, and understood in the same breath that this would be missing her point by approximately the width of the sky.
"Yes ma'am," he said, and went to make her breakfast, and forty minutes later he was on his bike with the morning pouring gold through the trees, pedaling the four miles south toward the plant and trying not to think about how he could slip away with Marcus knowing so he could glimpse the eclipse out the loading dock.
Ultimate Apparel on a short-staffed day was a study in organized chaos.
That was Spencer's private theory, anyway: the chaos only looked random. It had rules. It had a routing system. Kowalski's section sat abandoned, and Kowalski's work had already entered the system — drifting across the floor, getting handed off, set down, nudged along, every transfer looking accidental and none of them being accidental, all of it moving by some unposted schedule toward whoever was least likely to send it back.
"You're doing the face," said a voice at his shoulder.
He didn't jump, something he should be proud of. Danny was hard to detect on a good day, never mind the chaos of today. The trick to detecting Danny Peaks was environmental: you watched the people nearby, and when two or three of them straightened up and discovered urgent business elsewhere. The man was six-foot-something with a laugh that rattled shelving, and he walked like a wraith. Spencer believed the universe had balanced the laugh against the footsteps. You know, to get the balance.
"I don't have a face," Spencer said.
"You have several. That one means it's not yet nine and you're already done." Danny looked at the clipboard in Spencer's hands, then at the line of Kowalski's work creeping toward Spencer's section. "Eclipse today."
"You've mentioned it forty times since March." He said it without any edge at all, which was the thing about Danny. Most people filed Spencer's sky-watching mutterings under eccentricity, tolerated mostly. Danny filed it under facts about Spencer, same drawer as his coffee order. "Peak's at three-fourteen, you said."
"You're off at two. So you'll —" Danny stopped, recalculated against the Kowalski situation, and arrived where Spencer had arrived an hour ago. "You're not getting out at two are you?"
Danny was quiet a moment, which for Danny was an event that you never witnessed. Then: "Three o'clock, I'll cover your section. Ten minutes. You go stand in the parking lot and look up." He held up a hand before Spencer's objection cleared the gate. "Ten minutes, Spence. Nobody in the history of this plant has ever noticed ten minutes."
It wasn't what he had planned. It wasn't the day he'd circled in red. But it was offered the way Danny offered everything — flat, practical, already settled — and Spencer had just enough sense to take it.
"Okay," he agreed. "Ten minutes."
Somewhere around eleven, the universe produced Tomás.
Tomás was three weeks in, young, careful, still mapping the invisible politics of Ultimate Apparel — and Patterson was walking him toward the returns area with the particular tyrannical tone that rubbed Spencer the wrong way. A pallet of damaged and returned stock had been sitting since the weekend — mildewed boxes, a split bag of something that had gone sour, garments that had to be sorted by hand to figure out what was salvageable and what went in the dumpster. The corner smelled like a thrift store that had flooded; it was probably growing its own ecosystem at this point.
"It's not that bad," Patterson was saying, in the voice of a man who never had to take on the task himself.
Spencer watched Tomás look at the pallet, then at his hands, then do the new-guy math: is this the job, is this normal, who do I even ask. And Spencer felt the old familiar gears turn — the cost-benefit, the don't-get-involved, the calculation of exactly how much it would cost to open his mouth, which was the calculation he always ran and almost always lost. He was still running it when Danny's voice cut across the floor beside him.
"Patterson." Not loud. Danny was never loud; he didn't have to be. "That's not the new guy's job and you know it."
Patterson turned. "Somebody's got to—"
"Somebody will. Me and Spence'll take it." Danny said it easy, already deciding, the way he decided most things — like the outcome had been obvious to everyone and he was just the first to say so. He clapped a hand on Spencer's shoulder. "Right?"
"Right," Spencer said, and meant it, and was aware in the same breath that he hadn't been the one to say the first word — that he'd stood there debating with himself while Danny simply acted, and that the gap between those two things was the whole story of him.
Patterson looked ready to argue, but found the conversation wasn't worth its price of making the well-liked Danny mad, so he left with a huff, throwing a snide look over his shoulder. Tomás looked between them.
"Does that happen a lot here?" he asked.
"Sometimes." Spencer was already pulling gloves from the supply closet — two pairs, because if Danny was taking the pallet then Spencer was taking the worse half of it, that much he could do without being asked. "Stick to what's in your job description for a while."
The returns pallet was every bit the experience advertised. He and Danny spent forty minutes sorting other people's ruined merchandise, Danny keeping up a running commentary that made it almost bearable, and Spencer came out smelling like the dumpster he'd half-filled earlier today and feeling just as cruddy; the kid hadn't deserved it, and they'd spared him. Danny had spoken. Spencer had agreed and felt guilt for not being the one to step up first. Spencer had spent his whole life with that type of guilt swimming around in his chest.
Not twenty minutes later, Marcus found him and spent four uninterrupted minutes explaining what the staffing situation required of Spencer's pace, and Spencer stood there smelling like the dumpster and listened to all four minutes without producing a single syllable in his own defense.
Say something, said the voice in his head that had been saying it for thirty years. Danny would. Danny did, an hour ago, for a kid he barely knows.
"I'll pick up the pace," Spencer said.
Marcus moved on, satisfied, the daily dressing down delivered to one of his favorite punching bags. Spencer pulled out his phone — reflex, nothing on it — and Alex's contact photo looked up at him from the favorites screen. Fourteen years old, the Driscoll family curly red hair that he shared with Spencer and his grandmother, his mother's eyes, a grin the camera had caught before the kid could manage it into something more dower; the kid hated having his picture taken. Spencer stood there a moment with his thumb over the picture.
Danny could throw a sentence across a factory floor for a stranger. Spencer had never once managed to throw one across a kitchen table at Alex's father.
He put the phone away and went back to work, because that was the other thing he was good at.
The eclipse was starting.
He noticed it on his lunch break, stepping out the side door to eat somewhere that didn't smell like musty lint — and stopped with the sandwich halfway out of the bag, because the light was wrong. Not dark. Thinner. The world became more subdued, the animals that normally made their presence known hiding from the amazingly eerie event. The shadows under the fence had gone strange, every gap between the chain links throwing a little crescent onto the asphalt, dozens of them, a stencil of the eclipse happening overhead.
A few coworkers had drifted out too, phones out as they took pictures of the shadows on the ground, making end-of-the-world jokes in the tone people use when the joke is doing load-bearing work.
Spencer got out the notebook.
He'd bought it months ago with vague journaling intentions that had never survived contact with an evening. It lived in his jacket pocket out of optimism. Now he stood in the lot with his sandwich forgotten and wrote: 12:50. Partial coverage. Crescent shadows. Temp dropped — 4, 5 degrees? Birds in the fence-line trees gone quiet. Quiet like dusk. His hand wanted to keep going, so he let it. Air feels like before a storm but no storm. Held-breath feeling.
He knew that feeling. That was the thing he couldn't have explained to anyone but Nana — he'd met that feeling a hundred times, standing in the yard at dawn, on the nights of meteor showers, in the minute before weather changed. The world's inhale. He'd been chasing it his whole life the way other people chased music.
He'd just never felt it this loud.
Dave from receiving looked over his shoulder. "Are you journaling right now?"
"Of the eclipse?" Spencer grinned at the dubious sound of the other man’s voice.
Dave thought about it. "Okay," he said, and went back to his phone, and that was the entire exchange, and Spencer wrote that down too, for no reason he could have defended.
Inside, through the early afternoon, the weird things started happening that had the workers looking up in confusion. The lights hesitated twice — not a flicker exactly, more a thought the lights had and decided against. A bagging machine threw a fault code, cleared itself, threw it again. The air on the floor picked up a charge that made the hair on Spencer's forearms stand on end. Nobody else seemed to register any of it. Spencer registered all of it, filed it in the notebook in the dry shorthand he was developing — 1:38, flicker. 2:10, flicker + fault, line 4 — and noticed that his unease had stopped feeling like weather and started feeling like a countdown. Honestly, it was probably so that he wouldn’t get in trouble with Marcus if the man decided to blame someone for the issues.
At five minutes to three, Danny appeared at his elbow, took the clipboard out of his hands, and nodded at the door.
"Ten minutes," Danny said. "Go."
The parking lot was half-full of people who'd had the same idea, eclipse glasses and welding masks and one pinhole cereal box held by a man Spencer was fairly sure was the plant safety officer. Overhead, the sun was nearly gone — a thinning crescent, then a thread, then —
The corona bloomed silver-white around a black disc, and the whole lot exhaled at once, the jokes finally giving out, and the streetlights stuttered on in their confusion, and the birds stopped completely, and the temperature fell like a curtain. Spencer stood with his head back and his throat tight and took in all the sensations. This. This was the thing he'd circled in red. The universe doing something enormous and asking nothing for it except attention, and he was here, he had made it after all, ten borrowed minutes in a parking lot and it was enough —
Then an aurora appeared around the eclipse.
Colors came off the eclipsed sun where no color should have been — a ripple of pink at the corona's edge, then green, then a blue with current in it — and it spread. Fast. Not the slow shimmer of photographs from northern latitudes but curtains, sheets of light pouring down the sky toward the horizon, low, descending, until the whole bowl of the afternoon was hung with moving color and somebody behind Spencer gasped out What is that in a terrified voice.
Spencer's eyes filled. He didn't fight it, didn’t wipe them. He had spent his whole life telling people the sky was alive, in smaller words, in apologetic versions, and here was the sky agreeing with him in front of witnesses.
He was still looking up when it reached into his head.
The pain arrived behind his eyes first — pressure, like two thumbs pressing inward from a direction that didn't exist — and then it was light, white and total and coming from inside, and then a sound rose with it, one high clean note held past the limit of any breath. His vision broke apart. Doubled. The parking lot split into two parking lots that wouldn't lie flat on each other — the ordinary one, asphalt and stunned coworkers and crescent shadows, and underneath it, sliding against it, something else, bright-veined and moving — and the seam between them ran straight through the middle of his skull.
His knees hit the asphalt. He heard it more than felt it.
Somewhere very far away, in the original parking lot, nobody else was screaming. Nobody else was even kneeling. They were all just standing under the impossible sky, untouched, faces tipped up, while something pried Spencer's eyes open from the wrong side — that was what it felt like, exactly that, a door being forced in a wall that had never had a door, hinges that were his optic nerves, and he got his palms flat on the ground and felt nausea rolling up his throat.
He may have made a sound, but he couldn’t hear over the ringing that surged through his eardrums.
His vision came back blurry, his head still spinning from what just happened. What was happening? The pulse continued as a pressure, and the light seemed to hum from everywhere at once — he felt it all around his body, through his hands, seeping into his very being, then silence. Blissful silence, wait, silence? The plant's exhaust fans wound down, and the streetlights that had stuttered on went dark, and across the lot a dozen parked cars fell silent mid-idle one after another like a sentence losing its words, and somewhere east there was a sound, a tearing sound, high up, car brakes screeching? He experienced all of it through the white noise of his own skull, what was probably the end of the running world arriving in fragments between waves of pain.
The waves got longer. Then lower. Lingering. Spencer knelt on the asphalt, breathing like a man who'd surfaced from deep water and slowly, carefully, lifted his head.
The two parking lots had become one parking lot.
And the parking lot was full of light.
Threads of it. Strands of light — faint, luminous, drifting through the air between the dead cars, running along the fence line, through the grass at the lot's edge, through the stunned and milling people, through like it was alive— slow, patient, purposeful, like a breath made visible. He looked directly at the nearest one. They slowly vanished into the air, like they didn’t just come from the sky and cause a massive light show. He almost thought it a figment of his imagination, but the flickers at the edge of his vision told him otherwise
The seam in his head had closed. The door was open. He understood, in some wordless basement level of himself, that it was not going to shut again.
He raised a hand to his head, hoping to smooth away the lingering ache behind his skull. The sounds of his coworkers’ voices were now a dull murmur in the background. He raised a hand toward the nearest thread — trembling, not entirely his own decision — and a spark crossed the gap to his fingertip. Small. Definite. A point of contact, there and gone, like a handshake from something on the other side of a language.
"Okay," Spencer whispered, to the lot, to the light, to the sky still hung with fading color. His voice came out scraped. "Okay."
Around him the human noise was starting — my phone's dead, mine too, what did you do, nothing, I didn't do anything — and the silence after that exchange was the most frightening of all, it cut through the ache radiating behind his eyes, only for his chest to receive a heavy blow, this time from dread and fear.
The thrum of electricity was gone; the city that always had ambient sound was quiet.
The aurora struck the power grid.
No electricity. A four-hour battery. Backup tanks in a hall closet, limited use.
He was up before the thought finished — swaying, vision tender at the edges, the threads flickering in and out, but his mind was elsewhere right now to pay attention — and moving for the door to grab his bag. Inside, in the dark of the dead building, he nearly walked past Tomás, who stood frozen against the wall with a stillness that bordered on unnatural.
Spencer stopped. "Hey. Tomás." The kid's eyes came around. "Head outside. Don't stand in here alone. Come on." He waited the two seconds it took for the kid to start moving, stiffly, like a mannequin just learning to walk, and steered him through the door into the strange bright air. After making sure that Tomás was okay and with the others, he hurried to the bike rack. He had four miles from here to home. The world was still shrouded in the shadow on the eclipse and something truly changed, but he couldn’t think about that right now.
He placed his helmet on his still tender head before kicking off and pedalling away from Ultimate Apparel, ignoring the shouts that started up that sounded suspiciously like Marcus’.
He needed to get home, and for once, he didn’t need to second-guess himself.
baratheonpilled
areudirty
2087
titsay
turnnoffyourmind
kianamaiart
tangentwithtanner
pixelskylines
