During the Eclipse
By Christopher Owen


Once a month I like to walk down to the beach at night and watch the full moon. I usually smoke cigarettes, or weed if I’ve managed to lay my hands on some. As the smoke drifts off into the night air, I like to think it’s some sort of sacrifice I’m offering to the moon–-if I worshiped the moon, that is. I don’t worship anything these days, but the moon seems as good a target for my veneration as anything else I might choose to cast it toward.
The smoke almost always seems to conjure someone from out of the darkness. Sometimes it’s kids who’ve caught the scent of my weed and want a hit. Sometimes it’s one of the half crazed homeless people who live in a little shanty town down by the retaining wall. One time it was a beautiful blonde girl who walked out of the sea and sat beside me. She was naked but for the glistening seawater dripping from her body.
“Are you a mermaid?” I’d asked her.
“I’m a Nereid,” she said.
“What’s a Nereid?” I asked, even though I knew what it was. She smelled like the ocean.
“I’m a daughter of the sea,” she said casually, her voice like a trickle of water. “What are you?”
“I’m a human,” I said, wondering how I smelled to her.
“What brings you to the beach tonight?” she asked.
“I’m worshiping the moon,” I said. I really didn’t have any other reason to offer.
“Have you ever seen the moon from beneath the sea?” she asked. I said that I hadn’t. “It looks like it has been shattered on the surface of the water, and been severed into a thousand bright shards of gold.”
I wondered if I should feign anger that she spoke so irreverently about my pretend god. Instead I said, “That sounds pretty.”
“There are many pretty things beneath the sea,” she said.
We sat in silence for a while, me smoking my joint, and she merely breathing in the night air and my second-hand smoke. At length, a shadow began to creep across the disk of the moon.
“Something is eating away at your moon,” she said to me after a while.
“It’s just an eclipse,” I told her. I’d read earlier in the paper that there was to be one tonight.
“What’s an eclipse?”
“It’s just the shadow of the earth, darkening the moon. Don’t worry, it’ll be back.”
“Well, that’s good,” she said. “It would be sad if you didn’t have anything to worship.”
I agreed. I looked over at her. In the growing darkness, she was indistinct. What little moonlight was left outlined her little silhouette with a pale glow against the shadows of the beach. “I could worship you,” I said at length.
She giggled. “But I’m not a god,” she said.
“Neither is the moon,” I said just as the last bit of its light slipped behind the earth’s shadow.


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Christopher Owen lives in Texas with his wife and two cats. His work has appeared at Daily Science Fiction, Every Day Fiction, Mystic Signals and other places. He is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop.