| CONTENT WARNING: INSTANCES OF BULLYING & HOMOPHOBIA |
The schoolkids mill along the steps of St. Andrew’s Primary waiting for the morning bell to ring and the teachers to throw open the doors. Liam can’t resist the urge to pester his older brother, who stands apart from the other eighth-grade boys looking reproachfully in their direction. “There’s going to be an eclipse today, you know.”
Jason looks away, squinting into the sun. Liam follows his gaze, but the blinding sunlight causes him to shield his eyes.
“You shouldn’t look directly into the sun,” Liam says, trying to impress him.
No response. He wonders if it will always be like this. He tries to remember the last time Jason didn’t treat him like some bothersome rash.
“I heard the Sox might go all the way this year.”
“They’ll find a way to blow it,” his brother says over the wail of the bell.
It’s not the response he was hoping for, but he prefers it to being ignored.
One day, maybe soon, they won’t be enemies anymore.
Students begin filing in through the double doors. Liam checks his digital watch and sees that it’s exactly eight-thirty. Just an hour-and-a-half until the eclipse starts. The night before, he calculated that the eclipse should reach its maximum around recess time. He recalls the local news segment from earlier in the week. The meteorologist said it would be the last opportunity for Chicagoans to witness an annular eclipse this millennium. The segment ended with a firm warning not to view it without protective eyewear. Liam begged his father for a pair of paper eclipse glasses, which he managed to find at the pharmacy.
Anxiously, he searches his khaki pants for the glasses. In one pocket, he finds the rare stone he brought for show-and-tell; in the other, he finds the paper glasses. He breathes a sigh of relief.
He joins the flood of students entering the school and takes the stairway down to the third-grade corridor. Ms. Janowicz’s classroom is similar to the rooms he had in previous years except for the mural on the back wall. It’s a colorful depiction of Matthew 19:14, which Liam knows by heart—But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven. Though for what misbehavior the children were being made to suffer, he can’t say.
Liam slouches into his desk chair and quietly waits for Ms. Janowicz to begin class. The other boys are still congregated around the lockers talking loudly. Along the side of the classroom, the girls huddle together in three clusters, each one an indicator of popularity. The bell rings. Several students meander to their assigned seats. Others remain in place, continuing to chatter. The teacher claps three times to get their attention. They trudge to their seats. She stands at the front of the class: short, with salt-and-pepper curls and permanent frown lines. Liam is quite terrified of her, as are the other students. She announces they will begin class with their reports on the day’s news stories.
One classmate describes the mayor’s new appointee to City Council. Another one shares a national news story about some high school in Burnsville, Minnesota—Liam stopped paying attention. There was an election in South Africa. The score from yesterday’s Bulls-Hornets game. Liam finds it harder and harder to keep his eyes open. He supports his head with his arm, but with each passing moment the room drifts farther away.
“Liam!”
Ms. Janowicz’s piercing voice rouses him from sleep. Her smile is vaguely threatening. He hears the muffled laughter of his classmates.
“Liam, give your report on today’s weather.”
He stands and nervously unfolds a slip of paper. “Scientists say that an anyalur eclipse will take place today. An anyalur eclipse is when the moon is too small to cover the whole sun and leaves a ring of light around the moon. You should use special eyewear when viewing an eclipse.”
He is nearly back in his seat when he remembers one last detail. “You can also use tree leaves to view the eclipse.”
One of his classmates raises her hand. “Yes, Ally,” the teacher says.
“That’s not weather,” she says, glowering at Liam. “The radio said it would be in the seventies today and partly cloudy.”
“That’s true. Liam, I’m giving you an incomplete.”
He collapses into his seat. Head on the desk, he fortifies himself from further humiliation by crossing his arms in front of his face. Ms. Janowicz signals the start of reading class. Liam spent most of last night carefully reading through the assigned story. It was about a girl who lives on Venus where it rains all day, every day, for years on end. Having been born on Earth, she misses the sun dearly. One day, her class is told that the sun will come out for just one hour. The girl is overjoyed. But moments before the sun appears, the other children stuff her in a locker and she misses it.
“So what does this story teach you?” Ms. Janowicz asks.
Liam looks around at the other students in the classroom. Most of them gape at her. Others frantically thumb through the pages trying to find the answer. He remembers how the story made him feel. He raises his hand. Ms. Janowicz nods.
“Maybe it’s about being disappointed,” he says.
“That’s right,” she says. “It teaches you not to stuff someone in a locker because you wouldn’t want that to happen to you, now would you?”
Liam checks his watch. It’s already ten o’clock, which means the eclipse is underway. The room’s hopper windows don’t offer much of a view, but he can see it’s still bright outside. Ms. Janowicz directs the class to take out their items for show-and-tell. Students take turns displaying their prized possessions—a watch fob from the Civil War, a limited-edition comic book, a hummingbird pendant made of semi-precious stones. On its surface, Liam’s treasure isn’t as exciting; he knows that. But who among them possesses a magic object from an ancient land? He stands before the class, arm outstretched. In his palm sits a smooth triangular stone. His classmates are indifferent. He decides to jazz it up a bit.
“Behold!” he says too loudly. “A rare stone millions of years in the making. From the deep marble quarries of Connemara, Ireland. They say each piece has the power to grant one wish.”
He parted with four pounds at a Dublin gift shop for the souvenir, but he reckons his classmates don’t need to know that. Ever since his family trip to Ireland, he’s been obsessed with Irish folktales as well as the island’s mysterious early inhabitants.
“What did you wish for?” one boy asks. “Nothing,” he responds. “I’m saving it.” “What for?”
The answer seems obvious to Liam. “Because after the wish is used up, it’s just a regular old rock.”
After show-and-tell, Ms. Janowicz sends him on a special mission to deliver a note to the sixth-grade teacher. He slips the note, along with the wishing stone, into his pocket and heads for the tunnel connecting the primary school to the junior high. Along the way, he considers what a strange name the sixth-grade teacher has. Mrs. Sipiora. His footsteps echo through the tunnel, bringing to life an otherwise drab corner of the school. His pace quickens into a skip. He counts one Mrs. Sipiora, two Mrs. Sipiora, three Mrs. Sipiora . . .
He stops to use the old boys’ bathroom in the junior high basement. Damp and cavernous, he pretends it’s an undisturbed tomb. He likes to think it belongs to him because no one’s ever there to yell at him for whistling or slamming the stall door. He notices an absence of sunlight through the frosted windows. He checks his watch. Eleven forty-five. By the time he returns to class, it will be recess. Finally, he’ll be able to see an eclipse for himself, not just read about one in a textbook.
He heard once that scientists have a pattern for predicting them. How many people from the past had seen this very same wonder long ago? He recalls it was in Ireland, at the stone mounds in Meath, that he first learned what an eclipse was. Some stargazing druid recorded the rare phenomenon in stone. He imagines within himself a deep and enduring bloodline to the ancients.
He finds the sixth-grade teacher’s room without much difficulty and hands her the note. Upon leaving, he is confronted in the hallway by a pair of intimidating eighth-grade boys.
“You’re Walsh’s little brother, aren’t you?” one of them says. Liam nods.
“Your brother’s a homo. That must make you a homo too.”
Laughing, they shuffle past him. He trembles as though he’s narrowly survived a run-in with dangerous predators. He can hear one of them say, “I bet their parents are homos too.”
That word. He’s unsure what it means. Nothing good. The more he thinks about the encounter the angrier he becomes. He wanted to defend his family. Liam hurries back to more familiar territory, bitter tears blurring his vision. Through the windows of the third-grade hallway, he can see how dark the sky has become. By the time he reaches the classroom, students are already lining up for recess. Liam overhears snatches of excited conversation.
“You mean there really is an eclipse?”
“Is it true you’ll go blind if you look at it?”
“My cousin said eclipses happen when a black hole blocks the sun.” “Don’t be stupid. If it was a black hole, we’d all be sucked in.”
Momentarily, they go silent as they notice Liam, the eclipse expert, standing in the doorway. He faces a hail of questions. Fortunately, most of them have yes or no answers; even if he gives the wrong answer, he’s confident they won’t know the difference. For once, Liam feels accepted among his classmates. The boys ask if he would like to play football.
Ms. Janowicz instructs the class to remain in line while she has a word with the other third-grade teacher. The boys’ conversation veers into sports. Jeffrey O’Donnell and “Big Danny” Boozman gloat about their Sox-Mariners tickets, and Nick Bolger attempts to impress them with wild postseason predictions. Liam wants to contribute to the conversation. He remembers what his brother said earlier.
“They’ll find a way to blow it,” he informs them.
The boys are stunned. He knew it was the wrong thing to say the moment it came out of his mouth. He wishes he could take it back. Nick Bolger gets up in his face.
“What did you say?”
Liam shakes his head. “Nothing—I didn’t mean it.”
“What did you say, Walsh?” he repeats with more emphasis.
The other boys echo the words, crowding in around him. Nick pushes Liam to the floor. Just then, Ms. Janowicz appears in the doorway. She takes Nick by the collar and sets him to washing the blackboards for the duration of recess. He stares hatefully at Liam, tears streaming down his face. Before dismissing the class, Ms. Janowicz warns the students not to gaze directly into the eclipse. Liam follows his classmates out to the playground. As he exits the room, he sees Nick whisper something to Big Danny.
He shrugs off the whole encounter and checks his watch. Exactly twelve o’clock. The moon should be directly in front of the sun, forming a narrow ring of light. He is filled with nervous energy—his pagan blood awakening, he suspects. He pushes through the double doors and tilts his head up to the sky. He scans the darkness, but it’s nowhere to be seen. He turns around and notices a bright patch in the sky above the school. The eclipse is hidden behind a small tuft of cloud.
Some students pay no attention to the cosmic event. They jump rope or play football as they ordinarily would. Others stare at their feet, hoping to avoid the harmful rays. He reaches into his pocket for the eclipse glasses. Dizzy with anticipation, he doesn’t know if he’s ready to see it. A sliver of the sun’s disk peaks out from behind the cloud cover. He feels the paper glasses being ripped from his hand. He spins around to see Big Danny.
“Give them back!” he screams.
The boy says nothing. Liam attempts to wrest the glasses back, but it’s futile. His classmate is too strong for him. As the clouds dissipate, Danny puts the glasses on. Liam hops up and down, trying to grab the glasses from his tormentor’s face. Danny keeps him at bay with an outstretched arm. When he grows tired of the spectacle, Danny tosses the glasses to Jeffrey O’Donnell who then passes them to another boy. They take turns donning the glasses and describing the wonder above them mockingly. There’s nothing Liam can do. He collapses to the ground. He covers his face, not wanting his classmates to see his tears. Laughter surrounds him.
He reaches deep into his pocket and takes out the wishing stone. He balls his fist around it and shuts his eyes. Please, ancestors, let me see . . . please let me see . . . please let me see . . .
He opens his eyes. Something miraculous has happened. Light from between the tree leaves casts miniature eclipses onto the grass below. In his mind, they could be thousands of glowing rings dropped from the fingers of a thousand angels.
Brian K. Hauser lives in Chicago with his boyfriend and a voracious beagle named Hera. By day, he writes and edits social studies textbooks that emphasize anti-racism. In what seems like a former life, he was a James A. Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. Follow him on Twitter, @RabbleHauser.
Hypertext Magazine and Studio (HMS) publishes original, brave, and striking narratives of historically marginalized, emerging, and established writers online and in print. HMS empowers Chicago-area adults by teaching writing workshops that spark curiosity, empower creative expression, and promote self-advocacy. By welcoming a diversity of voices and communities, HMS celebrates the transformative power of story and inclusion.
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