The Day the Moon Ate the Sun

By Jacqueline Vogtman

So you remember, I’ll tell you again where and when we first met: in Germany, near the end of the Second World War, during the solar eclipse. I was a girl who’d left her family’s farm to work in a shoe factory in the city. You were an American who’d lost both arms and legs in Normandy. Your buddy wheeled you around the cobblestone streets, and sometimes on my breaks I’d watch you from the second-story window. You looked like a sack of flour sitting in that wheelchair. No limbs. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t stop watching. Unlike everyone else walking the streets with their coat collars pulled up around their faces—and unlike me—you seemed happy, as if you didn’t know the war was still going on, as if you didn’t realize you’d lost your arms and legs.

I was their best shoemaker—I had strong hands that could make quick stitches in thick leather. But shoes made me sad, especially when I thought about all the men, like you, who would never wear shoes again. Such a simple thing, a pair of shoes, but a symbol of all the simple things we’d lost. Butter. Midnights. American movies.

On the day of the solar eclipse, I walked outside with the rest of the line even though we weren’t on break. The streets were packed. Old women and men, frightened housewives, teenagers, children, American soldiers, German soldiers—everyone had crawled out of their corners to witness the darkening of the day. The crowd might have been mistaken for a riot, but no one was fighting. It was the most silent crowd I’d ever been in, as if everyone were holding their breath.

Each person in the crowd was looking up at the sky. Except you. You were looking at me. I clutched my purse tighter as your friend pushed you toward me, and when you got there your friend took a step back in the packed streets to give us privacy. But before we could speak, the light began to dim, and we looked up, then down again, because the sun was still too bright to look at directly. You gestured toward the ground: there was a large piece of blue glass by the curb, a remnant of a storefront window blown out by a bomb. You told me to pick it up and hold it over my eyes so I could watch the eclipse without hurting them. As I did, I saw you look at me, your face tense and your raw arm-stumps quivering as if it pained you to watch me do something you wished you could do for me instead.

It was beautiful, the way the moon ate the sun. Behind the glass the disappearing sun looked almost blue, a crescent, like the curved cursive of the letters you would write me after you left, before I came to America to be your wife. And then, so swiftly, the sun was gone. All that was left was a gold ring, a flaming wedding band.

I crouched next to you so you could see, too. I held the glass over your face but you didn’t tilt your head up, didn’t look at the sky. You looked at me for what seemed hours, through blue glass, until the streets lightened again.

Your buddy came back to take you to an alehouse, but I offered to wheel you around the streets instead. You didn’t object. I took hold of the wheelchair handles, still warm from your friend’s hands, and it made me think about your hands, lost on a beach somewhere. I wondered how they looked. Did you have thin fingers or stubby? Did you have translucent nails or were they yellowed from tobacco? And your feet—were they big and hairy, were they callused, did they have high or low arches? These are things another woman would have found out about her husband after living with him for over fifty years, but I never did.

But as I pushed your wheelchair down the street, I wasn’t thinking about your lost limbs. We glanced at one another, at the littered roads, at the broken windows. Everything seemed exceptionally bright and shiny, washed with holy water. The sunspots in our eyes gilded everything in our path, as if we made the world rich just by looking at it. _______________________________________________________________

Jacqueline Vogtman’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Avery Anthology, Berkeley Fiction Review, Necessary Fiction, Pindeldyboz, Prick of the Spindle, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University, where she served as an assistant editor of Mid-American Review.