He didn’t think she’d come out here with him. She was usually such a hermit. For her to drive out late at night into an unfamiliar destination just so they could climb some rocks to watch an eclipse hadn’t seemed likely, yet here they were.

He’d assumed she’d want to turn back when they passed a nearly hidden homeless man in the shadow of the rocks, and again when a group of drunken teenagers stumbled across their path, but surprisingly she seemed perfectly relaxed. Perhaps she was glad to have even an imperfect sense of isolation after they’d walked through the bustling streets of the city earlier.

They made their way up the topmost boulder on the hill and sat on its edge, their legs dangling down into nothingness as they stared at both the celestial lights above and manmade city lights below.

“It always strikes me how impotent our street lights are when I see them from far away. Look at them! They illuminate nearly nothing and yet it takes such an extensive network of wires running through and across everything just to get them to function this ineffectually.”

She laughed at him, “I guess I never thought about it.”

“But you’re thinking about it now. Does it not make you sad that humans are so bad at creation?”

She examined the city lights below, “Actually I think they’re very beautiful. It’s funny because above us right now there are very few visible stars…and below us sparkles a thousand pinpricks of light. The whole thing looks reversed to me.”

“What do you mean reversed?”

“I mean it feels like we’re sitting on the sky, and that the ground is shimmering high above us.”

He looked out at the land below and tried to grasp her meaning in his mind. Abruptly the positions of earth and sky inverted and he saw the world as she described it. He felt suddenly dizzy as he pictured himself upside down and clinging to the edge of the world while staring into the moon below.

He carefully moved to his stomach, hands gripping the boulders edge, and looked again at the city lights. They really were stunning if you looked at them from her perspective.

“You’re right…I didn’t see it before but they really are beautiful.”

She laughed again, then also flipped onto her stomach so that she was lying next to him, her hands grasping the ledge beside his.

“Look” she said, pointing above/below, “You can see the edge of the moon disappearing into shadow.”

The blood moon was beginning.

From their disparate perches they observed the revolutions of the cosmos.

Her in the Heavens above.

Him on the Earth below.

***

David T8tz mostly wanders around the country playing dodgeball but can also be found singing in support of his new DIY indie album release titled “Pack Thy Secrets Deep,” about tragedy, depression, grief, love, addiction, and battling PTSD. He recently moved from Los Angeles to Bakersfield and as he has found much less dodgeball to be played around here, he has started using time that would normally be devoted to his favorite sport to instead mess around with biographical short story telling. His album can be found on iTunes or at https://davidt8tzandhislovelyfriends.bandcamp.com/album/pack-thy-secrets-deep and he can be reached at DavidET8tz@gmail.com