Black Moon Pupil

Blue sky like printer paper. Flat and forever. Vinny stared at a dog hair sticking out of the windshield air vent. She imagined it was a match. She jilted her head to strike a flame on the strip of pavement and set the sky ablaze. Except the sky only stared back. Unamused. She had been driving for eons. 

"No, I was listening, I just didn't hear you," Vinny lied. 

"I said, it's a coincidence that they overlap perfectly. Considering the star is about 400 times larger than the moon,” her sister said.

"It's called the sun, Julie." 

Vinny loved Julie. Julie was ten and in the freshman STEM club. Julie was perfect exactly as she was -- from her rabbit teeth and sheared hair, to her insistence on wearing exclusively overalls and knock-off Ugg boots. Julie would grow out of it. 

"Technically, it's a star. And from our vantage point on Earth, it’s the perfect distance so that we see the moon and star as the same size in the sky. What are the odds? What if the moon were a few ten-thousand miles farther? I have a theory. A honking cosmic coincidence like that doesn’t just happen. It’s a simulation.”

“What’s a simulation?”

“All of it. Life.” Julie furrowed her brow at her own thoughts and her hand slipped to her mouth. Julie was predictable as tides. She began to gnaw on her galaxy nail polish. “Either way,” she said, still chewing, “we can thank the heavens for eclipses!" 

Vinny could feel Julie grinning at her in her periphery. She was waiting for a reaction. The heaters vibrated under their seats. Vinny had to pee or had peed or would pee herself soon. She cut off a semi truck without signaling. She pulled the minivan onto the gravel shoulder in a gust of blaring horns and tawny dust.  

Vinny heard Julie chastising, but she was already out of the car, already slide-jogging down the sandstone ridge. “Gotta go!” she called over her shoulder. 

The desert had flatten from saguaros to shrubs some hundred miles ago. Vinny tripped over a barrel cactus and caught herself from falling onto a jumping cholla, its fuzzy fingers reaching for her hiking boots. She found a low boulder and dropped her pants. The clouds were moving slow as rocks. 

Why couldn’t Vinny be grateful? Urine reflected off a pebble and sprayed on her thigh. It was Julie’s birthday, a gift from the universe, the last June 20th they would spend together. 

“We’re gonna miss the eclipse if you can’t hold your bladder.” 

Vinny glanced up. Of course Julie was sitting criss-cross in the dust. She chucked an object at Vinny’s face. It was a pack of tissues. 

Twelve hours of driving through the darkness thudded into Vinny’s limbs. She threw her arms up. She wasn’t even annoyed that Julie didn’t abide by the concept of privacy. Julie was the best thing about the world. She would do anything for Julie. 

“My theory is that it’s a painting!” Vinny said.

Julie cocked her head, so Vinny rolled her wrist at the desert while zipping up her jeans with the other. 

“Geology?” Julie said. 

“Sure, geology, those rocks. They are not real. In fact, I bet they are cake. I bet if we hiked over there, those layers would smoosh under our boots like fresh snow.” It was a thought that had occurred to her three hours prior as she maintained the vehicle along the endless line of asphalt. She didn’t know why she needed to share it now. 

“You are making fun of me,” Julie said. Her voice had flattened, but Vinny recognized the teeter of a half-question in the words. The whites of Julie’s eyes intensified. 

It was her needled expression, the same Julie had worn on the shore two years ago when Vinny stood knee-deep in the lake, her arms outstretched towards the quacking eight-year-old. “Lots of eight-year-olds know how to swim,” Vinny said, and by lots she meant everyone in Julie’s class. Everyone raised in the Sonoran knew how to swim. After half-an-hour Julie hugged herself and took two cactus-wren sized stumbles towards the teasing waves. Later Julie explained that there had been needles in the pebbled shore, which is why after two steps, Julie burst into tears. Convulsive sobs. 

Vinny had lifted each of Julie’s soles to the sunlight. The vying wills of mind versus body must have rent Julie in two. Julie had done her best. Vinny believed that. Since that day, Vinny knew Julie’s needled face. 

Vinny squirmed. 

“You know what, it is a wild coincidence,” she said, “the size and position of celestial bodies, just isn’t my thing. 

“I can explain more about it in the car if that would help you understand?” Julie said. 

Vinny tried to disarm her face as she straightened up. Her knees inhaled; she felt herself in the expansion of her muscles, long and alive. How long had they been driving? In the fall she would start boot camp. Her limbs would not belong to her as they did now. Julie would be back in the city with their stepmom and light pollution. Every Saturday Vinny would collect her phone from the plastic lockers and listen to the hours of voice messages Julie would leave. Vinny would cry silently while she listened, or stare at the stucco walls or iron uniforms. 

“Well if life is a simulation, maybe those rocks really aren’t real. How about we go check? If it’s cake, I won’t sign the contract, and I’ll come back to Phoenix with you” Vinny said. She was being absurd. But she really needed to run. Without a glance at Julie, she took off towards the cake rock. She could feel her sister following. They had time to stretch their legs a little before the eclipse. 

Contrary to the placid surface, deserts— like oceans—are loud for those with certain ears. Red-capped woodpeckers nail their beaks into the hearts of saguaros. Hummingbirds fan the yellow fragrance of ocotillo blooms. Even the hustle of scorpion feet shift the grains of sand. When a human woman thunders over cracks and dunes, the coyotes wink awake in the brush. The sentinels of the wild bear witness and shudder the vermin from their pelts. 

A wave of tightness rose in Julie as she watched Vinny shrink into the brown. She didn’t understand her sister, and it scared her. She raised her solar viewer to the star. The eclipse was nearly full, like a spoon dipped in milk. They could not be far from the path of totality, but aside from her sister and the semi-trucks barreling by and the hidden creatures, the desert was deserted. There should be a crowd of star gazers somewhere near, identifiable by their card-stock glasses and rubber necks. She looked to her sister disappearing. She let out her breath and got into the driver’s seat. 

The minivan sprang forward. Julie gasped. She raised her toes and drifted forward. She tapped the brakes and the seatbelt knocked the wind out of her. She readjusted and tested the gas, gentle this time. The wheel felt weighty in her hands. Steering onto the road was slow as guiding a telescope towards a select strip of universe. 

Julie reached 80, 90, 99, then 100 miles per hour as the uncanny dusk-dawn glowered into the sky. Somehow the eclipse had started too soon. She was missing it. The only total eclipse she would see in her lifetime. She needed to stop, fling the door open, and throw her head back. She wanted to absorb the gossamer filaments of starlight, let them sink in and reflect off her retinas -- the black pupil of moon. She slammed on the brakes. The car spun out. 

Vinny stopped dead in her tracks. Dimly aware, through the heartbeat in her temples, that she was alone, but she had been alone all along. She knew that. Had known that. 

So this was what a cosmic coincidence looked like. Julie had pressed her thumb onto the map and traced the destiny of the shadow from Mexico to Ontario. The air hushed as if Julie’s thumb had muffled the sun. Julie must have miscalculated. She thought they had another three hours. They were supposed to be together for this part. A scorpion spidered up Vinny’s ankle. 

Black smoke rose from the direction of the road. The car. Vinny ran, propelled into the blue-gray dawn of a never-ending day. Her feet beat earth, but as she approached the smoke shattered. Bats waned and waxed, coming together and flitting apart, a cloud of confusion. The car wasn’t where she thought she’d abandoned it. She jogged in circles beneath the bats. As the star parted ways with the moon, nocturnal and diurnal worlds awoke to the other for the first time. 

Then Vinny spotted a second tail of smoke a mile down the road. She ran. There had never been another option.