Ben was blind from birth.  His mother knew it the moment she held him and saw his star-shaped irises and pupils.   The iris themselves were gray with little white flecks in them, and the pupils were (as pupils tend to be) black as the depths of space.  His mother was shocked at her first glimpse, but she couldn’t help cuddling and nursing her child with starry eyes of her own, the kind that made her heart pound and warmth flood her being.  The doctors told her that his eyes were completely unresponsive to light, that the problem went deeper than just their shape, but his mother insisted that there was no ‘problem’, that she couldn’t imagine a more perfect shape for her beautiful baby boy.

            Immediately, of course, when an aunt told the neighbors about the baby’s eyes, the buzz spread like smoke from a chimney, and, soon after, everyone in town was whispering about The Boy With Star-Shaped Eyes.  The mother drank during pregnancy, some said.  No, she fell down the stairs, others responded.  The boy was touched by God, said part of the church.  The boy is cursed, whispered the others.  Some parents called in the hopes of meeting the special boy, while others wrote threatening letters and emails warning the mother to keep out of specific public places.  Awkwardly pokey and proddy old men shambled over in the grocery store while make-up-less mothers in drab sundresses would push their strollers faster in the park.

            Ben’s sister Lisa didn’t quite share her mother’s adoration or the desire of the neighbors to gossip.  Lisa was six when Ben was born.  At first, she saw him as simple competition for attention, but as she realized how much more attention his physical deficit demanded, she began to see him as the Boy Who Took Her Parents Away.  She often huffed in the corner or stood with her arms crossed in her mother’s shadow.  She would stomp down the hall on the way to the bathroom or on her way to retrieve a toy just to make herself a bit more heard, even if she was the only one who really noticed.

            For his own part, Ben was a pretty normal child other than being blind.  He didn’t know, of course, that he had star-shaped eyes in anything but an abstract sense even as he grew older.  He didn’t know the looks people gave him, though he was well-aware of their whispers. 

           Otherwise, he laughed when tickled, smiled when hugged, cried when he stubbed his toes.  He would sit on the living room rug, turn his toys around in his hands, and push the sound buttons a thousand times until mom or dad said, ‘please for the love of God, stop’.  He would nestle against mom or dad on the couch to listen to stories and pull a blanket onto his lap to hear his favorite cartoons.  On Sundays, they all listened to symphonies or jazz.  On weekdays, he listened to audiobooks for hours, sometimes to think about the stories, sometimes because he loved to hear someone’s voice continue on and on.  Everywhere he went, he carried a strip of felt that he’d had in his crib as a baby, and he loved to pinch it with a circular motion between thumb and forefingers while he thought.

            Even at his mother’s funeral when he was twelve, he still held the strip of felt, pressed it tighter than ever as the tears rolled down his cheeks.  Cancer, of course, undetected until beyond positive prognosis.  Afterward, his father was spread thin, and he begged Lisa to hold off on college a little while to help him.  Lisa’s heart was a resentful one, but big enough nonetheless.  She got a part-time job in the evenings and helped tutor her little brother and kept him company.  Though she never would have admitted it, she loved the time she spent with him and knew it wouldn’t last forever.  It’s his eyes I hate, she told herself all the time.  They’re to blame, not him.

            During their afternoons together, they went for walks through the neighborhood and talked and talked.  Ben loved asking her to describe the things they passed, and Lisa loved how musical his voice became when he talked about sound.  The one topic that was off-limits, of course, was mom.  They danced around her memory like figure skaters who leaped so much their skates hardly seemed to touch the ice.  It was, after all, her memory that filled Lisa’s heart with its deepest resentment, while the pain of her absence never ceased to threaten to break his world apart. 

            Then came the day of the total eclipse.  They’d heard about it for weeks on the internet and the news.  It would be the only one to pass directly over them in their lifetimes. Lisa was especially excited.  At first, Ben was interested in feeling the daytime air when the sun vanished, but that got him thinking about his mom’s absence, how the world seemed so much colder without her to lean on, without her to snuggle up under a blanket against to listen to a symphony or an audiobook. 

           Lisa bought special goggles and Ben had nothing to worry about from the sun, so they decided to go for a walk during the event.  It was a day of powerful heat, the sun unfettered by clouds, the insects driven into crevasses where the only moistures would linger.  Dogs hid under porches and flowers just went ahead and wilted.

           They went down the walk and Lisa turned them towards where she knew the Sandy’s Snow Cone truck would be parked at the edge of the community pool. Lisa figured that once they’d walked in the heat for a little while, a little cold blue raspberry or wild cherry would feel the smartest choice in the world.  Besides, Lisa had a bit of a crush on Sandy and was curious to ask Ben about what he thought of him.

           Ben stuck his hands in his pocket and tilted his head to the ground as he often did.  He carried his cane folded in his right hand, but Lisa had her hand in the crook of his left elbow to guide him for now.  Ben preferred to walk without a tool. It was the closest he could come to pretending that he hadn’t been born different. 

           Sometimes, when he walked, he wondered what his shadow looked like.  In theory, it was shaped like him, but it was shaped like him in a way that reflected how the sun saw him. 

           “You ever wonder what you look like to the sun?” Ben asked.

           Lisa startled.  She’d been thinking about Sandy’s cheeks, the way he always had at least some color of syrup somewhere on them, about how impressive she found it that he owned his own business so young. 

           Then, she chuckled as her mind caught up with what it had heard.

           “No Ben,” she said. Her voice was earnest and affectionate when she said, “I think only you wonder things like that.”

           “I think we must look so cold,” Ben said. “Like the only heat we have, like the only light we have, is borrowed.”

           Lisa thought about this for a moment.

           “If anything, I’d have to imagine we look so tiny, the sun wouldn’t think about any one of us at all.  I’d think we’d look like a sea of swimming specks, like algae on a pond.”

           “Either way,” Ben said.  “When the eclipse comes, it’ll think we’re starving.”

           Lisa checked her watch.  They only had a few moments.  It would be nice if they could eat their snow cones while they watched the eclipse, so she picked up the pace a little. Ben was still shorter than her, so he was forced into a light jog.

           “Hey,” he said.  “Slow down.”

           Ben could feel his heartbeat accelerate as his muscles worked harder.  A little anxiety nettled him.  It wasn’t the pace; he trusted her and knew she wouldn’t lead him into an obstacle.  Rather, she’d said she had a surprise planned to help them enjoy the eclipse, and he was worried they might not get to it in time.  After all, it was really about Lisa enjoying the eclipse, not him.  He’d go about its course not seeing it like he didn’t see anything. 

           As they ran, however, something strange began to happen.  His eyes began to burn.  It started out slight, kind of like the days when he was awake too long and his eyelids grew raw from blinking.  However, the pain worsened quickly and moved inside his eyes as well.  It was like he could feel the whole shape of his eyeballs aching in his skull. 

           The texture of the sidewalk changed under his feet to road, but he still felt Lisa’s hand inside his arm. She would keep him safe outside, but something was wrong inside.  He felt his pulse in his eyelids, and his brain to cringe the way it did when a sharp and unexpected sound occurred like a slamming door. The pain grew to a throbbing crescendo and then suddenly stopped all at once.

           His eyes were filled with blinding light.  It was a uniform field of white for a split second, but quickly shapes emerged.  Blurs of motion, outlines of things that blended with outlines of other things.  He couldn’t tell what was close or what was far or what was this and what was that.  It was all a huge muddle.  His mind told him there should be houses, ornamental trees and bushes, mailboxes and fences, stop signs and streetlamps, but he saw none of these things.  The world was a mud-like if you poured all the tubes of paint into a bowl and swirled them all up.

           There was a tug on his arm, but then he heard a voice.  Not just a voice, the only voice he ever wanted to hear.

           His mom’s voice. 

           It was all around him, it seemed.  So clear, so beautiful.

           The tug on his arm came again, and somehow it drew his attention up.  The sky was a great nothing, an openness as vast as the sightlessness in which he lived.  In it, there was a single, round disk which he knew immediately to be the eclipsed sun.

           And there in the sun was a beautiful face.  Though he’d never seen it before, he knew it beyond doubt to be the face of his mother.  Soft, rounded cheeks.  Sweet smiling lips, big, gray eyes brimming with tears of joy.

           Her voice said, “I love you, baby, come home to me.”

           The tug came on his arm violently this time, and the squeal of tires drew his attention to a blur of motion to his right.  He felt hands strike his chest and shove him off his feet.  Ben lurched sideways as someone screamed and something thudded hard.  An instant later, a wet smack.

           Ben himself collided with the ground with a thud, and he felt the skin on his arm tear on the gritty asphalt.  Somehow, his head didn’t hit the ground.

           Gasping, he looked back to the sun.  Whatever he’d seen was gone.  The moment of sight he’d had was gone. 

           He lay there, panting, as he heard panicked voices and footsteps and car doors closing.  He heard voices asking, “are you okay,” but none of them at first meant him.  Someone ordered someone to call 911, an ambulance.  Another voice said, “She’s not breathing, oh god, she’s not breathing.”  “Check the driver.”

           “Is he okay?”

           Finally, someone knelt by Ben.  He could feel their presence, their hot, frightened breath as they leaned close.  They didn’t need to say anything for Ben to know what had happened, for Ben to know that then the sun was blocked, his world had grown colder yet again.

           Then he realized that he recognized the smell. The vanilla coconut sunscreen.  The florid deodorant.  Underneath it all, the scent he simply knew as sister smell.

           “What happened?” Ben whispered as Lisa swept him up in a tight embrace.

           “You stopped in the street and wouldn’t move,” Lisa sobbed.  “I was trying to pull you out of the way of a car when a woman shoved us both.”

           “She’s dead, isn’t she?” Ben asked.

           He felt Lisa nod.  Could tell she didn’t want to say it. 

           “I wasn’t strong enough,” she said.

           Ben’s heart hurt like nothing before in his life.

           “I don’t think you were meant to be,” he said.

– Andrew Najberg