The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker Page A

quieter as the seconds passed, hushed by the darkness and the chill in the air. I became aware that dozens of dogs were barking, howling, from their yards. Minutes passed. The temperature continued to drop.
    A vague prayer slipped out of my mouth:
Please, please let us be okay.
    We were, on that day, no different from the ancients, terrified of our own big sky.
    We know now that the darkness lasted four minutes and twenty-seven seconds, but it seemed to stretch much longer. Time moved differently in those first few days. If it weren’t for the records—hundreds of people filmed the event—I’d still swear that at least an hour passed before the first glint of light reappeared in the sky.
    “Look,” I heard Seth saying. “Look. Look.”
    A bleed of brightness was spreading directly overhead, a sliver of sun returned to us, as if by miracle. Now we could see the outline of the whole thing, a thin circle of light with a blinding bulge on one side, like a diamond on a ring.
    I saw Mr. Jensen hurrying through the crowd. When he reached us, we finally heard what he’d been shouting.
    “Listen to me,” he said. “This is just an eclipse. It’s harmless. It’s just the moon’s shadow passing in front of the sun.”
    As we would learn in the coming hours, Mr. Jensen was right: A total solar eclipse had been anticipated for the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It was to be visible only from the decks of passing ships and from a handful of thinly populated islands. But the slowing had shifted the coordinates of all predicted eclipses—they used to have them all figured out, every future eclipse charted to the minute and the decade. This one had caught us by surprise. The eclipse was seen from a thick swath of the western United States.
    Relief passed through my whole body. We were fine. And there I was, lying on a hill with Seth Moreno.
    Seth seemed disappointed by the news.
    “That’s it?” he said. “It was just an eclipse?”
    We remained on the hill together, watching the sun reemerge. We squinted side by side, our backs on the grass. I was so close to him I could see the hairs on his forearm.
    “Do you ever wish you could be a hero?” he said.
    “What do you mean?” I said.
    “I want to save someone’s life someday.”
    I thought of his mother. My father had explained to me once how cancer worked, how it almost never gave up, how you had to kill every single cell of it. And you were never completely sure that you had won. It could always come back, and mostly, it
did
come back.
    “I might want to be a doctor,” I offered. This was only half true. I didn’t really know then if I could do what my father did. I didn’t know then if I could stomach all that blood and sadness.
    “Whenever I’m in a bank,” said Seth, “I kind of hope that a robber will come running in with a gun and that I’ll be the one who tackles him and saves everyone else.”
    From a distance, it had seemed that Seth’s mother was not going to die of her disease. The year before, she was still bringing brownies for bake sales and raising money for Mrs. Sanderson’s Christmas gift. She’d remained so active that it had looked like her cancer would be merely a trait she lived with, like being overweight or going gray. But I hadn’t seen her in a while.
    The color was returning to the sky, slowly but surely, the way a person’s face recovers after fainting.
    “I’m going to be an Army Ranger when I’m older,” he said. “That’s the most elite branch of the military.”
    “That’s cool,” I said.
    People were climbing back into their cars. Horns were honking. Dogs continued to bark. Some kids were heading back to their classrooms. Others were drifting away, off campus and into the world, too jittery to obey any rules or routine.
    Seth and I stayed where we were on the hill. A silence stretched between us, but it was an easy silence. We were alike, I thought, the quiet, thinking kind.
    I watched him watching the sky. A