The Hundred Year Eclipse

Emily was pregnant with Lucia when the meteor hit with enough force that the Earth stopped turning. Half the planet was in complete darkness and the other half was in a solar eclipse. Scientists predicted that it would take a hundred years for the moon to pass in front of the sun causing an eclipse that would last a hundred years.

Over the next twenty-five years of Lucia’s life, the United States slowly fell into darkness, until the moon obstructed the sun in its entirety. Her mother instructed Lucia never to look directly at the sun. There were plenty of stories of children looking at the sun who went blind. CEO’s of the country’s eclipse glasses became the richest people in North America.

There were other things that were affected by the meteor collision. The electromagnetic field of the Earth was also severely weakened because of the meteor, that it made it difficult to produce electricity. Cars no longer functioned, batteries stopped working, cell phones and computers became a thing of the past. The energy needed to produce even a small light was unreasonable and too expensive for any energy company to create. As it became increasingly hard to produce electricity America’s cities grew darker along with the sky.

People started to leave the cities for rural areas where they could at least grow some of their own food. Growing food was difficult because it was cold and dark, but some hearty crops like all kinds of potatoes, beets, and radishes found a way to adapt. By the time Lucia was twenty-five she had met a young man who wanted to move to the countryside. After they were married, they bought a small farmhouse with a creek on the property and they took Emily, Lucia’s mother, with them. Soon after they left, they were engulfed by complete darkness.

And then came their daughter, Keisha, born into a world devoid of light. While Keisha had never known the warmth of the sun on her face or the brightness of the colors of nature shining in the afternoon sun, she did hear stories about the world before the eclipse from her grandmother. For Emily, it was important that the child knew the world was different once. She taught her the ABC song even though no one read books anymore and Keisha could not understand the use of the letters. It was just a song to her.

Storytelling and sound became all important. Living in darkness wasn’t all bad. It was just an adjustment, so they adjusted. Everyone’s sense of hearing became acute. They could hear a deer a mile away. And the music! Music of every kind was created in every household. People no longer went out to restaurants, clubs or concerts, but they learned to make instruments with their own two hands and perform every evening for their families and neighbors. They seemed to have all the time in the world to spend with each other. No longer were people stuck in traffic on their way to jobs where they spent hours staring at computers only to spend more time in traffic getting home and staring at a TV before going to bed, then getting up and doing it all over again. They stayed home. They worked the land when they needed to, they ate, they slept, they talked to each other, and they made music with each other. Life was simple.

Although Emily tried her best to explain to Keisha what the world was like before, it never seemed real to her. Darkness was all she ever knew, and her imagination just could not begin to understand her grandmother’s stories, but it didn’t really matter to her because blackness was all she knew. When Keisha was twenty-two, Emily died and her stories of the world as it was, died with her.

Eventually, Keisha married and had a daughter of her own, Natalie. Natalie was cunning and her senses, other than sight, were so acute that she moved through the darkness rapidly with ease. She knew the location of bushes and trees from the sound of their leaves moving ever so slightly in the breeze. She could hear footsteps long before they reached the house. She could sense an approaching storm in the same way a dog could, long before claps of thunder could be heard. She used her heightened senses to become a skilled hunter with the crossbow she made by hand.

People hardly used their eyes anymore, in fact, most just left them closed. In the seventy-five years since the meteor hit, the world had changed so drastically that no one could ever imagine the world any differently. The stories of life before did not mean anything to anyone anymore because they knew nothing of that world. Most had never even heard of the hundred-year eclipse, so when the moon began to move past the sun to reveal a small bit of light people began to panic. They suddenly had reason to open their eyes and look at the sky. They could see the light even if their eyes were closed. They could feel the warmth which felt so comfortable after being cold most of their lives and while it was comforting, they knew not what it was and that was frightening.

The eclipse glasses manufacturers went out of business long ago when the sky fell into complete darkness. Emily’s instructions given to Lucia to never look directly at the sun, were not passed down. In fact, the scientists’ predictions of a hundred-year eclipse meant nothing to anyone and no one knew they could go blind by simply looking at the sun, but blind was the norm. Sight was new and frightening.

Natalie looked at the sky in panic as she saw light for the first time in her life. When she looked away, she instinctively released a sigh of relief as she reverted to the comfort of darkness.