Imagine an August afternoon so hot even a glass of icy fresh-squeezed lemonade couldn’t quench your thirst, where your skin felt both on fire and wet in the same moment. When for a full two minutes and forty seconds the earth held its breath, as the moon usurped the sun and created a flaming corona so white-hot it could be viewed from coast to coast, melting the horizon into a wash of coral and yellow before going black.
Thousands had gathered to watch the total eclipse and after the dark receded, Keady walked across the grassy meadow of Big Bone Lick in Union, Kentucky, to her rented Honda. Chevys pulling rusty trailers boasted I Support My President signs tacked up in the windows. Bed sheets doubled as curtains in vans for travelers who had arrived a day early to stake out a spot. Keady tossed her official $20 Nasa.gov eclipse glasses into a trash can. Scalpers were selling them by the road for $150, so she resisted for a second before letting them drop—it felt wrong—like tossing a twenty that could have morphed into seven times that much had she cared to sell the cardboard eyesore.
Since she’d lost her job last month and had nowhere to be, she waited for the masses to leave before sliding onto the sticky leather seat and double-tying her hair into a top knot. The Honda grinded into gear and bumped across the grass to the exit toward the Texaco station five miles away. Two of the pumps had NO GAS signs taped to their bellies and the station store was in disrepair with paint peeling from door facings. Wrinkled hot dogs charred under a heat lamp, and Skoal chewing tobacco lined the shelves by the cash register. She lifted a can and read the label. People really chew this–then spit it out? She tucked it under her arm. An old TV sat high on a shelf in the corner behind the cashier’s head, where a red haired news anchor spoke in breathless tones about Kentucky’s jackpot lottery–$152 million.
That’s a lot of zeroes. What would anyone do with that much money?
That’s when she decided to go all ham. She was born on February 26, 1979, the last time a total eclipse of the sun happened here in the United States. Her grandma always said “Keady, that means you have the luck of the sun and the moon in your DNA.” She promised something just as white-hot would happen one day and nothing would ever be the same.
Up until today, she’d been dead wrong.
The guy managing the cash register plucked at his sweaty wolf-howling-at-the-moon t-shirt and shoved the Skoal and Diet Coke toward Keady with one large-fingered swoop. Then he placed the five tickets in her palm, his rough hand lingering a second too long on hers.
“Promise me you’ll come back around this way and buy me a beer if you win.” He winked and grinned, revealing matching baked-bean incisors.
Keady shot him a cool look. “Don’t hold your breath.”
She made it to the airport in Boone County in less than an hour in spite of heavy traffic.
The hours ticked by but she managed to nap in spite of the uncomfortable vinyl airport seating until her cell rang with Unknown Caller, the third time that day. She decided to answer it out of sheer boredom, but dropped the phone after extracting it from her bag. All five lottery tickets fell in succession behind it, as if begging for attention. One ticket seemed glued to a sticky spot on the floor. Are you the big winner tonight? Keady spoke aloud to the ticket, and it ripped a tiny bit as it loosened from the tile.
And then chaos erupted—the loudspeaker announced at three times the decibel necessary that it was time to board, a service dog in a red vest began to bark wildly before switching to a lonesome howl. A slender woman sitting in the corner yelled “I have four numbers!” while staring at the wall TV.
The newscaster was reciting the winning lottery numbers, her auburn curls bobbing with excitement.
Keady had all five tickets in hand, the sticky wicket one on top. She glanced up at the screen, down at that ticket and back up again. Her breath caught as the clamor around her melted into a dizzying, whirring white noise.
Someone screamed.
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