At seven forty-five that morning, Vivian Valencia dragged her barbeque out into the street, then chilled the tomato juice and tequila for Bloody Marias, then counted out fifty-five sturdy paper plates—one for everyone in the neighborhood, plus guests. She folded the permit for the block party three times over and stuck it in her jeans pocket. Thank God Elliott and Daphne Baxter two doors down—astrophysicists or astronomers or something at Oregon State—were taking care of the protective eye gear.

It’ll be fine, she told herself.

Really? The sun is going to disappear in two and a half hours.

Then come right back out again.

“Of course, it will,” she said to the empty kitchen.

At eight, she stood at the sink peeling open packages of chicken sausages, which had the feel of cold, disembodied fingers. As she was laying each out on a plate, she looked up and caught Marilee—a petite woman with blonde hair fluffed around her face in a way Vivian was a little jealous of—staring at her. Their houses, built years ago, stood so close they could reach out and almost touch each other’s stucco walls.

Marilee slid her kitchen window open. “Deviled eggs,” she said as if they were in the middle of a conversation.

“Excuse me?” Vivian said.

“Deviled eggs. Will people eat them?”

They had been close once. Fourteen years ago, when Vivian and Lonny moved in, Marilee and Mel had simply appeared, offering to help carry cardboard boxes up the steps, get the sofa situated in the living room, unpack the coffee maker. The next Friday, Lonny, a short, fit man who liked getting people together, plunked down four camping chairs in their shared driveway and invited Marilee and Mel to try his latest Monkey Gland. Or two. Why not? Their children were long grown and out of the house. Weekly cocktail experiments began: Blackberry Collinses, Strait Jackets, and Last Words, which turned out not to be the last word, because everyone agreed that an English Bulldog was the most delicious spin on a G&T any of them had ever tasted.

When Lonny was diagnosed with cancer, Marilee brought over tuna casserole and took out the trash. Mel got the disposal working again. After the funeral a year ago, when Vivian was still in her pajamas most afternoons and the world a black hole of grief that swallowed everything, Marilee knocked on her door. “How’s about we get you a cat?” she smiled. They drove off to the animal shelter together and picked out a green-eyed tortoiseshell named Cosmo who soon took over the couch. “Companionably,” Vivian told Marilee over coffee.

But six months ago, she’d accidentally sideswiped Marilee’s Honda in their driveway. A long scratch, really. “Don’t worry about it,” Marilee said when Vivian apologized and offered to pay for the repair. But a coolness descended over their friendship, simply a hello coming when once there would have been conversation, sometimes not even eye contact. At first, Vivian thought this had been triggered by the accident, then she wondered if it was because Cosmo occasionally—okay, often—did his business in their yard. Or maybe she wasn’t very good company these days. She just wasn’t sure.

Whatever the reason, now they were simply neighbors. People who lived side by side and mostly ignored one another.

“Deviled eggs?” Vivian repeated. Because she was the block captain—a role she’d accepted because she had too much time on her hands after Lonny died, and which consisted mostly of organizing neighborhood get-togethers and forwarding emails from Corvallis city officials—people asked her all kinds of questions. Why hadn’t the garbage truck come this morning, and when would it be arriving? The power’s out at our house, who should I call? Once, after someone had thrown a mattress onto the sidewalk, Jackie Savage—a woman with a surprisingly angelic face—asked when Vivian would see to removing it. Being thrust into a role of authority because of a volunteer job she’d accepted, because it had absolutely none, always made Vivian feel uneasy.

“Well,” she said nervously, then plunged ahead because she herself liked nothing better than a good deviled egg. “Sure, why not?”

“Good,” Marilee said. “Thank you.” Her head disappeared from the kitchen window.

After Lonny died and her friendship with Marilee faded, Vivian took to walking the streets at dusk, the darkness descending around her. People’s lives revealed themselves then, their windows backlit and transparent. Last week, she’d watched the Lewises across the street bow their heads at the dining room table, the white globe of their light shining down like a full moon. Praying, she supposed, until she saw they were wordlessly devouring a pot roast. The startling blue eyes of Anderson Cooper rose regularly over the half-drawn shades at the house next to theirs, and silvery Christmas lights dripped year-round over the front porch on the corner. Walking by, she listened to them buzz like small insects.

There were other things, too, odd things she wished she could have told Lonny. How the sun stung her eyes as it made its way toward the horizon, how solemn and gray-pocked the moon looked when it first burst out of the birch trees, how on lonely summer evenings, bird-shaped shadows flew ahead of her, darkening the sidewalk.

She sometimes told him anyway, her husband of twenty-six years, when she was alone up in bed at night, about the neighbors who’d once been both of theirs, that instead of getting divorced the Parkers had gone polyamorous—lovers coming and going at all hours—and that the Keller kids were no longer allowed to play with Ellsworth kids, for reasons she had not yet discerned, and that the Clovises had built a chicken coop alongside their garage and filled it with white and auburn chickens. “Imagine!” she’d said out loud. “Chickens on Mill Street!”

The screen door now banged open and closed as she went outside to grill the sausages. Elliott Baxter, a heavy-set man who still managed to look light on his feet, emerged from his house a few minutes later. He unfolded a long table with a series of precise motions, set it down in the middle of the street, and pulled up three plastic chairs. Then he walked back up his front steps, passing Daphne moving in the opposite direction. If they spoke, Vivian didn’t see. Daphne stopped, looked up, and scanned the sky, prompting Vivian to do the same. It wasn’t nine yet, the sun still bright and whole.

Strangers milled around in the crowd: a woman with a shaved head and a crescent moon tattooed on one cheek, a man whose receding-hairline ponytail reached past his alligator-belted waist, and twins wearing identical star-covered dresses. Two men tried on flimsy solar glasses and laughed at each other’s reflection. Just past the table with egg puffs and extra-strong coffee, George Lewis was holding court. It was the ancient Babylonians, he said with an air of authority to the people circled around him, who first recorded a total solar eclipse. “Predicted their reoccurrence every six thousand, five hundred and eighty-five days,” he continued. Vivian nibbled on an egg puff, and moved on. As she made her way through the crowd, she couldn’t help but feel proud. I brought all these people together, she thought. She nodded and smiled at Kelly Lewis, who ignored her.

Lonny had always been the social one, a man with kind brown eyes who fell in easily with anyone, even the techie couple on the corner whom Vivian had once seen staring so hard into their laptops it almost seemed as if they’d burst into flame. Lonny would start up a conversation and she’d slip in at the edge, say “I had no idea either,” or “That’s all it took?” and in that way feel a part of things. Now at neighborhood gatherings, she had to force herself to bulldoze over and talk to people, ask how the seven-year-old across the street was faring in second grade, whether the mother’s new job was working out. Not today. She didn’t have the energy.

“Viv?” a voice said. “Hello.”

Vivian looked up to see Mel alongside her; the tip of his nose was tinged pink. One too many Bloody Marias, Vivian guessed from his tomato juice-encrusted glass. Mel grinned affably.

She and Mel had never had a falling out, though he’d always been more Lonny’s friend than hers. A man of companionable silences, her husband once said. Vivian had agreed. After Lonny died, she and Mel sometimes stood side by side on the street, briefly remarked on a neighbor’s freshly painted porch or newly mown lawn, then let minutes slip by without a word.

“Hi, Mel,” she said, feeling her heart speed up in her chest.

Yesterday, she’d gone into Marilee and Mel’s yard in search of Cosmo and noticed their back door stood ajar. She shut it firmly, but after seeing their car wasn’t in the driveway, she turned the doorknob, and slipped inside. She stood at their kitchen sink and stared at her house, imagining her singular head appearing and disappearing. She walked into Marilee and Mel’s living room, which looked familiar yet wrong. The gray, comfortably sagging couch where the four of them had sat for hours talking had been replaced by something sleek and black and leather. On the end table, a six-pack of two-inch-high potted plants was positioned to catch the afternoon sun. When did Marilee—or more likely Mel— start smoking weed? Vivian knelt down and opened the walnut liquor cabinet. At least the Tanqueray was where it had always been, back in the left corner. But the bottle was bigger than she remembered, the glass a brighter green. She found a small plastic container in the recycling, filled it with gin, just enough for a couple Bulldogs, and put the bottle back.

Without thinking, she took the stairs to the attic. Marilee told her that a previous owner had painted a mandala up there, something Vivian had always wanted to see. These were real stairs, not pull-downs, and she climbed swiftly.

The attic was full of rickety chairs, blackened camping pots, and an oak bureau missing one drawer. Someone had dripped wax over the edges of the rafters, thick enough in places to have hardened into turquoise pools. Was this the mandala? She couldn’t tell.

On top of a carry-on suitcase covered with cobwebs sat a white blouse Vivian had given Marilee for her birthday years ago. Vivian perched her gin on the bureau and tried it on, even though she knew it’d be too small, Marilee being a size six, and Vivian, a fourteen. She’d slid her big feet into a pair of even bigger orange flip-flops that must have been Mel’s. Slid them out again.

“Totality’s in fifty-two minutes!” Elliott shouted now. As if the earth had fallen away and he stood on the last piece of solid ground, people pressed closer to him. They held up their cereal box viewers, and crescent-shaped shadows floated down the street, sliding over curbs and climbing up front steps. The hydrant looked almost alive.

Mel lifted his glass. “Cheers!”

“Cheers,” Vivian echoed and poured herself what was left in a pitcher of mimosas. She put on her protective glasses and peered up. The sun was a small, colorless orb in an otherwise vacant sky. Just a sliver was missing. The air is getting cooler, Elliott said, though she couldn’t feel it. Maybe a solar eclipse wasn’t the huge deal people said it was.

Up in the attic, she’d noticed a tin box sitting on a spindly table. She made her way to it and opened the box. Inside, she found clumps of jewelry: an artificial pearl choker, a broken watch with a white plastic band, mismatched silver earrings. Why did Marilee keep all these? Vivian wondered. They certainly weren’t heirlooms. Inside, there were tangled necklaces, too, most with hopelessly knotted chains. She pulled on the gold-tone one she’d given Marilee for a different birthday, a necklace Marilee used to wear all the time but now had clearly abandoned. At first, it was ensnared with the others, then it suddenly broke free and kept coming. And coming, until the chain dangled, glowing dully in her hand. She stuck it in her jeans pocket.

She was opening a dresser drawer when she heard Marilee and Mel’s car in their driveway. She raced the stairs down two at a time, sped through the kitchen, and rushed out the back door. She called loudly for Cosmo, who came running across the grass. She’d picked him up and walked calmly into her backyard.

Mel looked intently at her, his red-rimmed eyes seeming to want something. When Vivian just smiled and didn’t say a word—Marilee’s necklace, she remembered, still sat bunched up in her pocket—he turned and talked to whoever that was standing on his other side.

Vivian walked to the nearest table and busied herself cleaning up. She threw away ketchup-stained forks and greasy paper plates, tossed crumpled coffee cups, then tidied the next table, too, stacking spoons on top of spoons and knives alongside knives. She arranged what was left of Marilee’s deviled eggs into one long, straight row and added a few arugula leaves. There, she thought. Much better.

“Totality starts in fourteen minutes!” Daphne Baxter loudly called.

The sky was turning purple, Vivian saw, the deep bright color of a bruise. The leaves on the maple trees trembled with crescent-shaped shadows, so many it looked as if they’d caught fire. Although it was just past ten in the morning, the rooftops started dissolving to the color of tin, some flattening, others becoming increasingly dark shapes. Through her protective eyewear, Vivian saw the sun was nothing more than a fingernail of white light, replaced not by the moon, but empty sky.

This was what she’d wished she’d told Mel: that sometimes she couldn’t recall the faint lines on Lonny’s forehead, or his fleshy earlobes, or the smattering of pink veins at the top of his cheeks. Occasionally, a wide thumbnail appeared, or the slightly hairy wrinkled skin behind his knees. They floated, these pieces of her husband, disembodied and increasingly surrounded by space. She had never gotten used to being alone.

A man scrolled his phone and shouted out, “Three!”

Three? Vivian wondered. Oh.

Josie, the little girl across the street, bounced up her front steps and immediately came back out holding a goldfish bowl in her hands. She leaned and whispered into the water. Fins faintly flashed.

It felt as if everyone was holding their breath. Shadows shimmered across the street and rippled over the sidewalks like billowing waves of sand. Vivian broke a cracker in two, smothered it with cheese, and nervously stuffed both halves in her mouth. Scores of lens-covered eyes tilted up at the sky. She leaned back, too.

A black wall thundered toward them, dragging darkness in its wake. It slammed into tables, swallowed strangers in plastic chairs. When the shadow hit Vivian, she felt as if the breath had been knocked out of her.

Up and down the street, people hugged and screamed. Several shouted, “Oh my God!” Vivian let out a high-pitched shriek she didn’t know was hers until it came out her mouth. The world took on the strange certainty of a dream.

“People!” Daphne yelled over the commotion. “This is it! Totality! You can remove your eyewear now. It’s safe.” But it didn’t feel safe, not to Vivian. Her own house, with its once friendly windows and sturdy front door, was washed with a sinister platinum light. The air felt simultaneously lighter and heavier. And cold.

A wind picked up, twirling napkins down the street. Vivian watched without feeling the slightest urge to go clean them up.

The darkness deepened, streetlights snapped on. Birds fell out of the sky and landed in pine trees. In the dark sky above them, stars blinked. Where the sun once was hung a cold, white ring. Hairs of light broke loose and gyrated across the sky.

“Wow.” Mel set his Bloody Maria down on the street. A shadowy head emerged from the other side of him, and the man’s brown eyes took her in.

Lonny. Not looking emaciated as he had at the end, but handsome and whole.

There was the same sweet mole on his chin. The same lanky hair that had thinned but never enough to make him look bald. After he died, she’d pulled the flowery sheet up to his chin and combed that hair, parting it six or seven times until she finally got it right. It was parted like that now.

He lifted his glass of sangria and smiled.

“Totality won’t be back for almost three decades,” Elliott yelled.  “Take it in, folks!” Vivian wanted to slap whoever it was shaking that tambourine. Instead she turned toward Lonny and saw Marilee standing on his other side. Her hand reached out and gestured Vivian closer.

You’re sure? Vivian wondered. Really?

But that thought melted away as they stood in the black midmorning, people gasping and shouting, robins roosting. Because here they were, the four of them together again, cocktails in hand, their words floating up into the silvery trees, as the sun quivered somewhere in the emptiness of space.

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Laurie Ann Doyle is winner of the Alligator Juniper National Fiction Award and a two-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize. Her book of stories World Gone Missing: Stories (Regal House Publishing) was praised by The NY Times bestselling author as a “gorgeous debut.” Her debut novel Light and Ash will be released in April, 2027 by Sibylline Press. Laurie’s short stories and essays have appeared in McSweeny’s, The Rumpus, Fourth Genre, Alta magazine, and The Los Angeles Review, among many others. She teaches writing at The Writers Grotto in San Francisco and UC Berkeley Extension. You can find her online at www.laurieanndoyle.com