Day 233 of 365 Days of Writing Prompts: Write a myth about what an eclipse means.
Erin: The solar eclipse is when evil finally concurs good.
Shannon: An eclipse messes with the world order. If things have gone well for you in the past, then you won’t be so lucky in the future. If your past has been hard, then you will find a silver lining. The world is about to change, let’s hope it’s for the better.
When the sun and the moon align.
Pelky Sisters 
“It happened once before, when we were young, you know,” I added quickly, eyeing the quick strides the so-called administrator was taking toward the front door. With a snap of her heel, she turned and smiled a smile that didn’t touch the smooth edges of her eyes, breathing like a dragon about to scorch a knight. When she took a small step in my direction I panicked and blurted out, “You know, it, it was when we very little and we were, well, we weren’t really that, uh, well, we weren’t that concerned with, you know, strange things happening in our, uh, in our lives. I mean, we didn’t even show our, our folks what we, uh, what we could do,” I admitted, feeling the high of terror draining from my body.
The woman narrowed her eyes and bit her cheek, clearly thinking on something intently, “Yes, well, none of that really matters. It is highly unlikely that you and your sister are who the prophecy told about.” As she spoke, making a few clipped notes on her clipboard, she turned to go, but paused momentarily with her hand on the door handle. In a moment of pure idealism, I thought she was going to tell me she was wrong, but as I saw the steely expression on her face my thoughts disappeared. “Oh, you two have this apartment until tomorrow; you won’t be able to use the biometric scanner on the door after eleven in the morning. Good day,” she whispered formally as she left the room.
Not a sound could be heard from the other side of the door, since these walls were well-insulated, but I could tell after a few minutes that she wasn’t coming back. Dropping my head in my hands, I called into the apartment, “You can come out now; she’s gone,” in the least devastated tone I could muster at this low point. Though no tears came, I felt drained by the whole interviewing experience; if only we hadn’t bothered in the first place.
“She wasn’t very nice at all,” added a pixie voice that always made my twin sister sound like a child. As she floated from the bedroom, lightly bouncing on her toes, she eyed me warily, reading the minute expressions that were a dead giveaway of my true feelings. With her sly smile, she murmured cheerfully, “You don’t like her, but you think she’s right. You don’t think we’re in the prophecy.” If she hadn’t plucked the thought from my mind I may never have come to terms with it, but I suppose it was obvious.
When she touched the back of my neck with her freezing fingers, I nearly jumped out of my skin; we may have been twins, but we were opposites in a lot of ways. I was this loud and obnoxious person who always had to speak her mind, where Annie was a quiet old soul with a soft voice and deeper understanding of people that she let on. If I was fire, fury and bright sparks; then she was ice, hidden meanings, and a frosty way of speaking that took the edge off her words and made them sound innocent. “Yeah, Anne, I agree that we’re not it. I do wish it were us because then we could stay here and live a life of luxury with everyone holding their breaths when they passed us, expecting any sudden movements to break us,” I spoke as images flitted across my vision.
“’When the two shall sleep under the same moon, the world will fall silent and into ruin,’” Annie repeated from the ancient texts we all knew too well; the search for the two had been going on for years now to no avail. Scholars were constantly debating the exact translation, as well as the meaning of the entire sentence. To some, it seemed that sleep was meant to be death, though the reference to the moon was lost in that idea. Others focused on the second part and debated what “ruin” really meant or whether it was a translation error that could mean anything under the sun. At any rate, no one could tell what any of it meant, even if it was a true prophecy in the first place, and it had been silly for us to waste our time submitting to this study in the first place.
I snapped out of my train of thought, preferring to think about what we were going to do when we got kicked out of the apartment, and sighed, “Well, at least we’re not the only idiots who came here. This whole building is full of people thinking they’re the two from the prophecy.” Shrugging my shoulders, I considered the idea that our lives were about to go back to normal tomorrow after waiting around for a week to be seen by that short-tempered woman.
We arrived back home mid-day and immediately headed for our separate bedrooms to adjust the clocks to our new sleeping schedule. Winding the ancient, dusty rose clock on my nightstand I peered out the scarred triangular window in my room and watched the long brown grasses sway in the light breeze. In all these years my sister and I had never lived in another building, unless you counted the year we were stuck in our Aunt Gladys’ dingy, musty old one-bedroom for a summer. Those two months had been hell on us, as we were escorted by our aunt and uncle on mandatory trips out of the house like church on Sunday mornings and antique-viewing on Wednesday afternoons. In the back of my mind I secretly cursed the two geezers for wasting an entire summer we could have spent catching fireflies and watching the stars twisting in the night sky.
As I leaned against the window frame, a slight breeze came up behind me and a twinkling laugh filled my ears, “Hey, sis, do you want to test our theory, since they didn’t want to?” I turned to eye the strange girl with pigtails and kind silvery eyes, searching her face for a sign of deception.
When I found none, I replied in a moss-soft tone, “Well, I suppose we ought to, right?” I could practically see my wide eyes reflected in hers as I spoke.
“That’s fantastic! We shall do it an hour before sunset at about seven o’clock,” she decided, skipping back out the door and rounding the stairs. I watched her go and heard the door to her matching room slam shut against the old frame, reminding me that she was a closed book to my easily-read emotions. Glancing down at the cat and mouse wristwatch I’d only taken off to change the battery on since I was six, I counted four hours until we were going to finally do it; I could do anything I wanted in four hours, and probably should. Panic flitted through, writhing in my stomache like a snake as I was forced to think about what our experiment could mean, not only for the two of us, but for the world.
Outside my doorway, the house seemed so much emptier when I thought about that kind of thing; the kind of thing that would have set our mother on edge, had she spent enough time on us to learn about it. Fire replaced the snake in my organs and I was suddenly reliving a slideshow of moments where we’d been attempting to tell her our secrets when she was still working. As the rage festered, the children in the memories grew fainter and the mother became a faceless figure murmuring to invisible people. When the world turned blue, quite suddenly, I watched the unidentifiable woman lying in a bed surrounded by hand-drawn pictures of flowers and children’s toys. People wandered through the memory muttering to the woman in strange dialects we couldn’t understand until the awful beep that ended that horrible week echoed in my mind.
I opened my eyes, having not realized they were closed, and was immediately blinded by the brilliance of the afternoon sunlight streaming through my lacy curtains. Safely back in my room, I shed a stubborn tear for our heartless mother, who’d thought more about her job than us, and vowed to never give her memory another moment of my grief. Even if she was dead, she didn’t deserve my sympathy, let alone my sorrow.
When I cross the room and headed into the bathroom, grabbing a bottle of sleeping pills from the cupboard, I made the mistake of peering into the cracked mirror hanging on the wall. In the reflection, though parts were chipped and refracted, was a sallow woman’s face with wrinkles creeping around her eyes and mouth without her permission. She reached up to touch the deep, sleep-deprived bruises beneath her eyes with a chip-nailed finger, feeling the thin skin delicately. Tilting her head, she eyed the bottle gripped in my hand, and I sighed, wandering back out of the dingy, dated room.
Down the rickety staircase, around the corner and into the kitchen I went, running my free hand along the modeled wallpaper as I sauntered through the familiar house. I didn’t want to waste another second in this world not knowing if our suspicions were correct, but the experiment would take both of us working in unison so I waited impatiently.
As seven o’clock dawned, like the moment of reckoning, Annie’s door creaked open and she padded down the steps on tiptoe. Without a word, she grabbed the glass of water I passed to her and followed me onto the porch, down the faded steps and out into amid the wild grasses. Though we hadn’t discussed who would be taking the pills, there was a silent agreement that I would be more likely to wake up in the event something, anything, happened. We lied down, having taken off our light summer jackets to rest our heads on, holding hands and became still as stone. Looking through a frame of dusty grasses was like wearing blinders to the wonders of the world, but it worked just fine for our needs.
With one last smile shared between us, we relaxed and I began my meditative breathing exercises. After a few minutes of relaxation, I felt myself drift and was suddenly floating in a quiet, peaceful space.
I woke with a start, having fallen asleep only moments before, and sat straight up. There, hanging in the sky right where the glowing ball of fire should have been, was a mass blocking out the brilliant glow of the sun and darkening the entire world. Already it was beginning to shift back, revealing that the sun was still safely in the sky. Blinking up at the sky, I roused Annie, who caught the last glimpse of the eclipse we’d caused by sleeping at the same time. It was exactly as we’d thought; silence was meant to be darkness, and sleep wasn’t a euphemism.
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The group all go to the Evert backyard to watch the lunar eclipse. It’s been a week since their first big mission, and they’re finally calming down from their ‘victory high.’
Shooting stars pass over them in the sky, and they see the shadow pass over the moon slowly.
“Who wants to know a story about August?”
“Josh no.”
But since there’s a majority of hands raised, Josh continues, “A friend of the family once convinced August that the lunar eclipse had magical powers and by looking at one meant you’d be cursed.”
“What kind of curse?” Finn asks, amid laughter. August’s face is bright red, but he covers it with the crook of his arm.
“It varied,” Josh states seriously while most of the group laughed around him, “From getting an itchy nose for a month to being completely immobile for a year. August didn’t believe them and looked at the eclipse the next night, but freaked when he woke up the next early morning sneezing with the worst case of the itches ever.”
August sits up quickly and yells, “You sprinkled itching powder in my nose, you dolt!”
Josh finally cracks, holding his stomach, “You…” he takes a breath, “can’t. Prove that.”
August gives him a look of disbelief, then lays back down, watching the moon fully disappear.
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