Shadowfall

They told us it was going to be the longest eclipse in recorded history.

Two hours and fifty-one minutes.

NASA livestreams, schools canceling classes, influencers dragging telescopes onto rooftops. The whole world marked the date: August 23rd. But this wasn’t that kind of story.

In a town that barely lit up on Google Maps, the eclipse meant something else. Not mystery, not marvel—warning. And maybe we should've listened.

I was there when the sky cracked open.

Not in some poetic, awe-struck sense. I mean literally—split. I was sitting on the hood of my stepdad’s rusted-out Chevy with Marnie, swatting mosquitoes, counting the minutes till full darkness. Eclipse glasses? Nah. We’d smoked just enough to feel brave and dumb, watching the sliver of sun shrink into a fingernail clipping.

“You feel that?” she said, hand still on my thigh, eyes up.

It was a hum. Like a tuning fork pressed against your spine. It started in the soles of our shoes, buzzed up into our teeth. I looked around. Birds weren’t chirping. Trees weren’t moving. But the air felt thick, like soup gone cold.

Then everything turned black.

Not moon-in-front-of-the-sun black. Not “ooh look at the corona” black. No halo. No shimmer. Just void.

The streetlights didn’t come on. My phone died. The stars were gone. Even the flick of Marnie’s lighter barely sparked before it sizzled out in her hand.

And then we heard it.

A thud. Distant. Heavy. Like a hundred-story building setting down its foot. Followed by another. And another. Getting closer.

“I don’t think this is the moon,” she whispered.

I didn’t answer. My brain had slipped into that primal part of itself—the part that doesn’t think, just screams.

People always want to know what it looked like. “The thing.” The one that walked during the eclipse.

I wish I could tell you.

Truth is, I don’t think it had a shape. Not one we could process. It was absence. A creature of subtraction, walking where light used to be. Where time used to run straight. Where laws of physics used to stand like old fence posts. Gone, just like that.

You saw it only in the way things stopped being.

The library? Folded in on itself like a crumpled napkin.

The gas station? Silent scream of metal twisting, without a sound.

People? Some vanished. Others turned to ash. A few just stood there, glassy-eyed, mouths open like their souls had been yanked out backwards.

We ran.

Marnie and I made it to the old middle school by instinct. Locked the doors. Found some emergency lanterns in the janitor’s closet. That dim, yellow light was the only thing keeping us tethered to reality. It flickered once every time it got close, like the thing exhaled static.

“I think this was man-made,” she said suddenly.

I was too busy barricading the windows with desks to respond.

“They’ve been building something out in Black Hollow. You remember that hum? That wasn’t just us. I read about it. They’ve been drilling. Digging deep.”

“Marnie, stop,” I snapped. “This isn’t time for a conspiracy binge.”

She pulled something from her pocket. A photo. Grainy. Satellite. Government-grade. You could just make out a spiral carved into the earth like a thumbprint.

“DARPA,” she said, voice flat. “This eclipse? I don’t think we scheduled it, but I think we triggered something. Something that needs darkness.”

We waited.

Two hours passed. Then three. No sunrise. No light. Just the slow, creeping wrongness moving through town, rewriting physics one block at a time.

And then—suddenly—quiet.

The kind that makes your ears ring.

Then a pop. Like a giant knuckle cracking.

The darkness peeled back like wet paper, curling at the edges, light bleeding in.

And it was over.

The sun returned, looking sick. Pale. Off-color. A few of us crawled out. Maybe two dozen. People with soot in their eyes and trauma etched in their posture.

The news ran cover stories. Said it was a rare solar anomaly. Blamed cosmic dust. Electrical surges. “No evidence of seismic activity,” they claimed. “No missing persons beyond expected eclipse tourism.”

But the town’s gone. Look it up. That zip code is archived now. Erased.

Marnie disappeared a month later. Said she had to “follow the signal.” Whatever that means. She left me a note that said:

“Next eclipse is in 7 years. That wasn’t a visitor. That was a door.”

Now I don’t watch the sky anymore.

Not on holidays. Not for comets.

Definitely not for eclipses.

Because if that door opens again...

We might not be lucky enough to be ignored.