“Let her go, Kevin,” Aunt Jackie says very calmly. “Kevin.” She has to put her hand on his and pry his fingers from my wrist. The manager—a guy named Corey; Dara used to flirt with him—is moving toward us slowly, obviously mortified.

Finally Dad lets go. He lets his hand fall in his lap. He blinks. “God.” The color drains out of his face all at once. “My God. Nick, I’m so sorry. I should never have—I don’t know what I was thinking.”

My wrist is burning, and I know I’m going to cry. This was supposed to be the night Dara and I fixed everything. Dad reaches for me again, this time to touch my shoulder, but I stand up, so my chair grates loudly on the linoleum. Corey pauses halfway across the restaurant, as if he’s afraid he might be physically accosted if he comes any closer.

“We aren’t a family anymore,” I repeat in a whisper, because if I try to speak any louder the pressure in my throat will collapse and the tears will come. “That’s why Dara isn’t here.”

I don’t stay to see my parents’ reaction. There’s a roaring in my ears, like earlier today, just before I fainted. I don’t remember crossing the restaurant or bursting out into the night air but, suddenly, there I am: on the far side of the parking lot, jogging through the grass, gulping deep breaths of air and wishing for an explosion, a world-ending, movie-style disaster; wishing for the darkness to come down, like water, over all our heads.

Nicole Warren

American Lit-Adv

February 28

“The Eclipse”

Assignment: In To Kill a Mockingbird, the natural world is often used as a metaphor for both human nature and many of the book’s themes (fear, prejudice, justice, etc.). Please write 800–1,000 words about an experience of the natural world that might be seen as metaphorically significant, employing some of the poetic techniques (alliteration, symbolism, anthropomorphism) we’ve covered in this unit.

One time, when my sister, Dara, and I were little, my parents took us down to the beach to watch a solar eclipse. This was before the casino opened up in Shoreline County and before Norwalk got built up, too, and became a long chain of motels and family-style restaurants and, farther down, strip clubs and bars. FanLand was there, and a gun store; nothing else but gravel-dotted sand and coastline and little dunes, like wind-whipped cream, spotted with sun-bleached grasses.

There were hundreds of other families on the beach, making a picnic of it, spreading out blankets on the sand while the disk of the moon moved lazily toward the sun, like a magnet pulling slowly toward its pair. I remember my mother peeling an orange with her thumb, and the bitter smell of pith.

I remember Dad saying, Look. Look, girls, it’s happening.

I remember, too, the moment of darkness: when the sky turned to textured gray, like chalk, and then to twilight, but faster than any twilight I’d ever seen. Suddenly we were all swallowed up in shadow, as if the world had opened its mouth and we’d fallen down a black throat.

Everyone applauded. There was a small constellation of flashes in the dark, miniature explosions while people took pictures. Dara put her hand in mine, squeezed, and began to cry. And my heart stopped. In that moment I thought we might be lost forever in the darkness, suspended in a place between night and day, sun and land, earth and the waves that turned earth back into water.

Even after the moon rolled off the sun, and the daylight came again, a bright and unnatural dawn, Dara wouldn’t stop crying. My parents thought she was cranky because she’d missed her nap and had wanted ice cream on the way over, and we did get ice cream, eventually, tall cones too big for either one of us to eat that pooled in our laps on the way home.

But I understood why she was crying. Because in that moment I’d felt it, too: a sheer, driving terror that the darkness was permanent, that the moon would stop its rotation, that the balance would never be restored.

You see, even then, I knew. It wasn’t a trick. It wasn’t a show. Sometimes day and night reverse. Sometimes up goes down and down goes up, and love turns into hate, and the things you counted on get washed out from under your feet, leaving you pedaling in the air.

Sometimes people stop loving you. And that’s the kind of darkness that never gets fixed, no matter how many moons rise again, filling the sky with a weak approximation of light.

Nick

8:35 p.m.

I fling open the front door so hard it cracks against the wall, but I’m too pissed to care.

“Dara?” I call her name even though I can tell by feel, by intuition, that she hasn’t come home.

“Hi, Nick.” Aunt Jackie emerges from the den, holding a glass filled with what looks like neon-green sludge. “Smoothie?”

She must have headed to our house in her car straight from the restaurant. Maybe Mom and Dad sent her ahead to talk to me.

“No, thanks.” I’m really not in the mood to deal with Aunt Jackie and her self-help “wisdom,” which always sounds like it came off the inside of a bottle cap. Let truth radiate toward you. Focus is about presence. Let go or be dragged. But she’s positioned in front of the stairway, blocking access to my room. “Are you staying here tonight or something?”

“Thinking about it,” she says, taking a long sip of smoothie and leaving a green mustache around her upper lip. Then: “That isn’t the way to get a response, you know. Not if you really want to talk to her.”

“I think I know my sister,” I say, irritated.

Aunt Jackie shrugs. “Whatever you say.” She stares at me for a long second, as if debating whether to tell me a secret.