During the Time of an Eclipse That Lasted Several Centuries. Carlos del Puente Stories

 The eclipse arrived uninvited, like a dinner guest who refuses to leave and instead begins rearranging the furniture to suit its “aesthetic of perpetual dusk.” The sun, reduced to a tarnished copper coin glimpsed through a keyhole, cast shadows that pooled like spilled ink in the corners of the world. Towns dissolved into rumors. Clocks grew moss. And the Pemberton family, who had always been mildly unhinged, embraced the madness like a long-lost relative—specifically, Uncle Thaddeus, who claimed to have invented silence by bottling the gaps between heartbeats and was currently suing the Vatican for copyright infringement.  At the center of this cosmic farce was Barnabas Pemberton, a man whose beard had begun to sprout lichen and whose left hand had recently unionized, demanding weekends off and a pension plan. Barnabas’s parents, Reginald and Esmerelda, were locked in a decades-long debate over whether time was a ladder to climb or a hammock to nap in. Reginald, a retired horologist, spent his days disassembling sundials with a crowbar, shouting, “You’re all complicit in this chronological fascism!” Esmeralda, a former ballerina who now believed herself to be the reincarnation of a Victorian lampshade, curated a museum of expired candles in the attic, whispering to their wicks, “You burned too brightly, darlings. That’s why they snuffed you.”  The twins, Felix and Felicity, were Barnabas’s siblings—or rather, his “temporal anchors,” as they insisted on being called. Born conjoined at the earlobe, they shared a single auditory canal through which they eavesdropped on the future. Their hobby? Hosting salons where they recited next week’s obituaries as spoken-word poetry. “Mrs. Henderson will choke on a metaphor,” Felix would intone, while Felicity mimed CPR we blew. They adored the eclipse, having long argued that daylight was “garish” and that humanity’s greatest achievement was the invention of curtains.  The extended family was a menagerie of malfunction. Aunt Drusilla, who married a scarecrow to spite her ex-husband (a botanist who left her for a particularly seductive Venus flytrap), communicated exclusively through limericks composed of farmyard noises. Uncle Hieronymus, a self-proclaimed “astronomer of the subconscious,” the moon’s dark side using only his dreams and a sextant made of gnawed chicken bones. The grandparents, long deceased but refusing to acknowledge it, haunted the parlor as a pair of sentient dust storms, materializing occasionally to critique the wallpaper or lament the decline of polite haunting.  The trouble began when Barnabas declared the eclipse “bad for business”—specifically, his business of selling existential reassurance door-to-door (“Guaranteed meaning in 30 minutes or your despair refunded!”). The family, who had been hosting nightly eclipse-viewing parties featuring moon-cheese fondue and existential bingo, revolted. Esmerelda accused him of “solarphobia.” Reginald threatened to disinherit his left hand. The twins composed a dirge titled “Ode to a Coward’s Retina.”  Undeterred, Barnabas allied with Aunt Drusilla’s scarecrow husband—now a radicalized anarchist after years of crow attacks—to build a “luminary liberation device” from stolen streetlamps and the angst of middle-aged clowns. The contraption, shaped like a dandelion gone monochrome, aimed to “renegotiate the sun’s contract” by blasting light into the sky like a ransom note.  Meanwhile, the grandparents’ dust storms coalesced into a manifesto titled “The Aesthetics of Eternal Twilight: Why Shadows Deserve Health Care,” which Felix and Felicity set to music using a theremin and a kazoo orchestra. The family’s debates crescendoed into operatic absurdity:  “The eclipse is a masterpiece!” shrieked Esmerelda, hurling a candelabra at Barnabas. “You’re just jealous because your beard photosynthesizes better than your ideas!” “It’s a celestial dictatorship!” Barnabas retorted, ducking behind a taxidermied wombat. “Even the moths are writing suicide notes!” “Moths are overrated,” sniffed Felicity, adjusting her eyepatch made of smoked glass. “They’re just winged nihilists.”  The device’s inaugural test flooded the town with a light so harsh it caused existential sunburns—patches of skin that glowed with the unsolicited wisdom of Socrates. Reginald’s sundials burst into flames, screaming, “We told you so!” in ancient Babylonian. The twins’ ear-conjoined brains short-circuited, leaving them temporarily convinced they were a failed telepathy experiment from 1967.  In the aftermath, the eclipse retaliated by birthing a second eclipse, smaller and petulant, which nested inside the original like a Russian doll with a grudge. Time curdled. Tuesdays became Wednesdays’ drunken hallucinations. The family’s parlor rug grew teeth and ate Aunt Drusilla’s favorite limerick (“There once was a hen from Nantucket…”).  Barnabas, now a pariah, took refuge in the attic with the expired candles, who comforted him by whispering, “Every flame dies, but the darkness? The darkness is tenure-track.” He opened a vein and let his blood ink a treatise titled “Apology to the Shadows: A Coward’s Manifesto,” which the family used to line the birdcage of their anarchist parrot, Nietzsche Jr.  The eclipse, satisfied, settled in for another few centuries. The Pembertons adapted. Felix and Felicity opened a blackout-themed bed-and-breakfast. Reginald took up knitting timelines out of unraveled sweaters. Esmerelda married the scarecrow in a midnight ceremony officiated by a moth priest. And Barnabas’s left hand, having secured its union demands, retired to a beach in the Bahamas that didn’t exist anymore, sipping margaritas made of existential salt.

By Carlos del Puente relatos