A month before your face disappeared, we were at the dinner table, silent as usual. Forking at the rice aimlessly, I blurted out to you “I signed a lease on a new apartment.”

Without saying a word, you got up from the table and finished your dinner from the office. Why had I said it? At the time I didn’t know. But now that I spent most of my day watching you meander around the house in silence, I have a good idea. I wanted to knock something out of you that you didn’t know was in there. I was dying for a rise, a thrown glass, a vocal decibel above 65, a splash of sparkling water to the face. Anything. But you couldn’t even grant me that.

---

I am starting to forget what color your eyes were. Or maybe I never knew to begin with.

When I first looked at you that afternoon, I remember feeling… nothing. The place where your face once was, now blank. I felt the rise of a scream form in my guts, but by the time it reached my throat, the sound dissipated into nothing more than a gasp. Here you were, staring back at me, faceless but otherwise unchanged. I thought staring at your faceless face would result in some immediate sense of dread or, at the very least, a head-on confrontation with my own mortality. There are love stories—     or maybe for some, horror stories—     of partners needing to care for their disgruntled lover as dementia and alzheimer’s set in. I wondered if I possessed the patient fortitude to endure the final years of a partnership watching a loved one’s mind degrade. But here I was, staring right into your faceless—

corpse is the word coming to mind, but that would imply you lacked all forms of life     

—body, and unable to conjure much of anything aside from a vague sense of concern. You’re nothing more than a haunting now, and even ghosts can still occasionally communicate.

By day three, I quit trying to pinch myself awake. I’d watch you move through the apartment as if on a track. Bed, toilet, coffee, shower, kitchen, office, couch, bed. The sound of your feet padding along the floor from the other side of the house, choreography mocking my own dissolving routine.

---

We were in the path of totality for the solar eclipse. The local airport had been promoting travel to the area for the past year—our city was expected to get nearly a million visitors.

You didn’t seem to care about the eclipse, despite me begging you for months to come with me to the top of the cemetery to watch the shadow descend over the city. You said that you had work that day and you couldn’t take off. I couldn’t remember the last time you had used any PTO.

The roof of our house was slick from the previous night’s rain when I climbed onto it to get a decent view. Had you not been in a Zoom meeting with your headphones on, you would have told me to be careful or given me a towel to sit on so my pants wouldn’t get wet. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking.

Fifteen minutes before totality, I prodded you. Without taking off your headphones, you shook your head no without looking away from your computer screen. Was that the last good look I got of your face? I walked off, disappointed but not surprised, and shimmied myself back out to the roof.

The whole thing took less than four minutes.

I hadn’t worn protective eyewear during the eclipse, something I would regret as soon as I tried crawling back through the window. Spots of light speckled my vision. Using my hands, I felt for the window sill and climbed back inside. All of my instincts were screaming for me to tell you about what I had just seen. But I hesitated. I knew you would barely be able to feign interest, taking off only one of your headphones and unable to maintain eye contact while I spoke. I let the version I had of you in my head hurt my feelings before the real version of you could.

After around forty-five minutes, I started getting antsy, expecting you to pop your head into the room to check on me. But your head hadn’t come through the door and I could still hear you pecking away at your keyboard from the office.

I approached you slowly—your headphones were still on, one of our universal leave me alone signals we had established early on. I tried to saddle up next to you, usually enough for you to notice me from your periphery and engage. But that didn’t work.

“Hey,” I said meekly, trying to get your attention. Silence.

“Hey baby,” I said again softly, tapping your shoulder. I wasn’t trying to start a fight and wanted you to sense the olive branch I was extending. You were enraptured in your work still. I should have known then that something had gone wrong, but I instead began inventing reasons for you to be icing me out.

“Babe, come on, look at me,” I said, this time grabbing and shaking your shoulder. That’s when you finally turned towards me. Face a flat canvas of flesh, with no eyes, mouth, nose, or any discernible contours. Just a blankness. Void. My instant reaction—one I now am ashamed of—was one of relief. ‘He’s not mad at me,’ I thought.

“Oh my god.”

---

You would have been surprised at how easy it was to apply. This program was more progressive, so it didn’t require any test scores. They needed a copy of my bachelor’s degree, three reference letters, and a 1,200-word personal statement.

I had all the materials to apply by the end of September. Online forums recommended reaching out to the graduate program director for a brief conversation so that they would recognize your name once they started going through applications. I remember it being a Thursday afternoon—I sent you a hurried text while you were in an all-hands meeting telling you that I was going to head out to a coffee shop to do some reading. You read the text but never responded.

I got to the coffee shop half an hour before my scheduled virtual meeting. Just enough time to house half of a muffin and some herbal tea.

The graduate director showed up four minutes late. “So sorry I wasn’t here at the start time,” she said, adjusting her hair and glasses in the camera. She sounded out of breath. “I had a student ask to talk to me after seminar, and I must have lost track of time!” She smiled apologetically, even though we both knew she was the one doing me a favor.

“That’s quite alright!” I said, trying to gauge how chipper my voice sounded. “I’m just glad you were able to make time for me,” reminding her of my gratitude.

“Oh absolutely. So, let’s get started—what questions did you have for me?”

The whole meeting took just under twenty-five minutes. It was hard to estimate her interest in me. At the beginning of the call, I tried to conceal my excitement about the program, but the more she spoke, the more buzz I felt in body at the idea of walking through the halls between courses. She could sense my sincerity, and the meeting seamlessly shifted into more of an interview, her asking me questions to determine if I was teachable.

“So, what made you want to apply for an anthropology program?” I could feel her full attention on me. My gut instinct was to cower away from it, but I leaned in.

“Well, I’ve always had trouble understanding people. So when I found out there was a whole field of study dedicated to understanding how people operated, I figured it would be my one shot to finally feel like…” my voice trailed off.

“Like people make sense?” she said. Her accuracy made me blush.

---

Once I had gotten used to rolling over in bed and seeing the blank of your face, flat and featureless, I decided I would spend a day studying you. By this point, it was clear that any kind of romantic attraction I felt towards you had been compartmentalized. You were no longer Jonah for me. How much of your routines were compulsion? I had my doubts.

Since we’ve lived together, it’s always been an 8:30 a.m. alarm plus two taps on the snooze button. I pretended to fall asleep next to you but snuck out to the couch once you had dozed off. Without the mouth or nose or eyes that usually give off the telltale signs of sleep—a snore, a rickety breath, the pupils darting back and forth behind the lids—it was difficult to tell when sleep had taken over. Morticians used to leave a mirror under a corpse’s nose to see if any condensation formed from the breathing. But there was nothing even resembling a nose to place a mirror under.

I was finally able to tell by the rise and fall of your chest. Have you ever watched someone fall asleep by the rhythm of their abdomen alone? The breathing begins shallow. But eventually, after enough of the shallow breathing, a switch flips and suddenly it’s all deep breaths like the ones for the stethoscope at the doctor’s office.     

I took my pillow out to the couch and set an alarm for 7:00 a.m.

I had barely slept a wink, instead staying up and fantasizing about what kinds of research journals I could get this data into. Not only would I be unveiling a currently unknown human experience—who had heard of someone’s face disappearing before?—but I would also be able to provide several days of thorough note taking because of my proximity to the subject. My career would skyrocket overnight before even starting my PhD program.

At 7:00 a.m., I switched off the alarm immediately before it would wake you up. I opened the voice memo app on my phone and began dictating.

“7:00 a.m., May 14th. The subject is still asleep, but should be awake by approximately 8:50 a.m. The subject has been without a face for approximately…let’s see, Thursday, Friday…Well, it seems like it’s been for about six days now. Aside from the obvious physical changes, though, there haven’t been any other distinguishable changes in behavior or routine. At least not to the untrained eye. But we’re about to determine with certainty what, if anything, has changed about the subject. By spending the next      seventy-two hours making note of all that the subject does, we’ll be able to…”

The springs in the bed creaked and I froze. It hadn’t occurred to me that you might be able to hear what I was dictating. Sure, your eyes and mouth and nose were gone, but not your ears. I closed the voice memo app and instead opened a notes app.     

I will have to provide the remainder of my notes via text because it seems like the subject can hear me talking, I wrote. I walked to the bedroom, avoiding all of the creaky panels in the floor, and watched until you woke up.

---

Like clockwork, you’re up from the bed at 8:50 a.m. I’m used to seeing you at least yawn, but instead of a gape of the mouth, a sigh, and closed eyes, I just see you tilt your head, ever so slightly, to the right.

8:50 a.m. Waking up. I write in my phone.

You pad to the bathroom, shut the door, and turn on the light and fan. One doesn’t need a graduate degree in anthropology to assume what was happening there, but I pressed my ear to the door anyway, curious if all of your bodily functions not attached to your face were still in order.

8:54 a.m. Uses the restroom, despite having no mouth and not having been able to eat or drink for approximately six days.     

The toilet flushes and the shower starts. This part I didn’t need to witness. There was no question about your continued hygiene since the change. I went to get dressed and brought my pillow back into the bedroom from the couch.

If you had a mouth, you would have said, “You’re up early,” when you got out of the shower and saw me dressed and fussing with my hair by 9:00 a.m.

9:06 a.m. No other anatomical changes present.    

You started eating your breakfast before I got downstairs, unfortunately. Cereal, milk, and a tablespoon of peanut butter. Half of the bowl was polished off before I entered the kitchen.

9:12 a.m. Breakfast.    

I deleted my note.

9:12 a.m. Morning meal of cereal, cow’s milk, and peanut butter.    

I watched nervously to see if you would finish your meal in front of me, but you seemed to have lost your appetite because you poured the remainder of the cereal down the sink and switched on the garbage disposal. I would have to wait for lunch.

---

I wondered if your coworkers would be able to tell that you had undergone a change, but since you worked from home and so rarely unmuted or turned on your camera for your work calls, silence was the norm. I watched you open spreadsheets, shoot off messages, reply to emails. From what I could tell, you were working.

9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Work.     

Did an entry like that truly convey how incredibly normal your routine appeared from the outside?

9:20 a.m. – 12:13 p.m. Maintained daily work obligations on the computer without eyes, nose, mouth, or face.     

I could revise while editing. Lunch was what I was really looking forward to. But it seemed like you only took bites of your sandwich while I was looking away. It would disappear, bite by bite, every time I checked my phone for the time, or looked at the TV, or snuck a glance at myself in the mirror.

I hadn’t washed my hair for over a week, and I had started to replace my tooth brushing with a quick swish of Listerine. It started out from sheer forgetfulness. I was far too enraptured by whatever was going on with you to remember to take care of my own personal hygiene. The hair I had been compiling on the shower wall had started falling into the tub.

---

The email came in while I was lying on the couch, scrolling my phone. “Congratulations!” it started in the subject line. I recognized the graduate director’s email address, the tiny headshot a much younger version of her. I listened for you in the other room—pecking away rhythmically on your keyboard, foot tapping steadily to the beat of music I couldn’t hear. You had come out to use the bathroom just under an hour before, so I knew not to expect you to move from your seat for a while longer.

Before moving the email into my starred folder, I hurriedly typed back a reply. “I accept!!”

---

I spent the rest of the afternoon after the eclipse online, looking for any stories remotely close to what we were experiencing. “No face,” “missing face,” “face disappeared,” “blank face.” I found posts of makeup artists trying to figure out the best prosthetics to create at-home special effects, illustrators trying to decide if their monsters looked better with or without a face, movie fans discussing some of their favorite anime characters. But nothing like what was happening with you.     

I’m not entirely sure what I was looking for—I don’t think it was for you to change back, admittedly. I think first and foremost I was looking for some kind of camaraderie. Was there some other girlfriend in, say, Kansas, whose boyfriend had turned to her one day without a face? Did she scream when she first saw him? Was she going to stay with him?

---

The offer letter was burning a hole in my pocket by the time I finally told you about it. It was a Friday night, after dinner. You had already squirreled away in the office. The whole time we were eating dinner, I kept trying to muster up the courage to say something. By the time I had roused myself into telling you, you were already up from the table, cleaning off your plate.

Sheepishly, I poked my head into your office. You were in the middle of a video game—I could tell before I even walked in by the tempo of your hands on the keyboard. I watched the screen, waiting for an opening to get your attention. I crept into the office, little by little, until I was standing just slightly behind you.

“Hey babe—” I started. Before I could finish what I was saying, you nearly jumped out of your chair.

“Jesus Christ! Don’t scare me like that!”

I studied your face for a few moments, looking for a sign of irony. How could it be so startling for the person who lives in your house to try and start a conversation with you?

“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to muster whatever remorse I could. Focus on what you came in here for, I told myself.

“What do you need?” you asked me, attention already starting to inch back towards the computer screen.

“I just…I came in here to tell you something.”

A beat passed by that I barely noticed but you must have, because your next response, simply, “…Yeah?”

“I came in here because I wanted to tell you that I got accepted into an anthropology graduate program. Classes start this fall, but I will need to be there this summer so that I can do orienta—”

“Wait, what?” Brows furrowed, you turned to me, frowning. “When did you apply for a graduate program? Why didn’t you tell me?”

I tried to widen my eyes, to get you back, but you were already hurdling away.

“I just…I didn’t think I would get in.”

You snorted.

“So they just told you? Doesn’t seem like very much notice.”

“Well, they told me about it eight weeks ago. I’ve been trying to figure out when to tell you.”

“Oh!” You said, nearly cutting me off. “So it’s me who’s getting the late notice. Okay.”

Your voice was rising, and to compensate, I felt myself shrinking.

“I’m sorry,” I said. And I think I really meant it, at least then.

“Well. Where is it?” By now, your impatience was barely concealed.

“Michigan,” I said, my head down. Again you snorted.

“So when were you planning on telling me that you would be moving out of state? Or were you planning on me just figuring it out on my own?”

My eyes blurred over, heavy with the threat of tears.

“I’m sorry, okay,” My own agitation starting to creep through. “I’m sorry. I was waiting until I had everything figured out. I’ve found an apartment off campus that we can move to.”

Your nostrils flared and I heard a low sound in your throat.

“Sounds like you’ve found an apartment that you can move to. I can’t just up and leave my job like this.”

And without another beat, you turned back to your computer, put on your headphones, and went back to playing your game.

---

Swallowed whole     

That’s what most ancient cultures believe happens to the sun during an eclipse. In China and Indonesia, it’s swallowed by a dragon. For Native Americans, a squirrel or a bear is to blame. Some cultures, like the Egyptians, refused to leave behind any written records about it for fear that it would make the eclipse become permanent.

And once these ancient cultures witnessed such a sight, did they feel indebted to a new god—

one who could fit their old god into its mouth whole, the only hint of its power barely able to peek through its teeth?

And it’s only taken several thousand more years to learn that the eclipse can steal away more than just the sun.     

---

I wasn’t sure how many days it had been—somewhere between fourteen and twenty, if I had to guess. That’s how long it took until you came back.

My research project lay abandoned and scattered across emails to myself and voice memos and notes in my phone. Pictures I had tried to take of you came out blurry, closer to a cryptid sighting than figures in a research paper. A small part of me considered that maybe with help from an advise     r I’d be able to piece it together in a way that made sense, though doubt still gnawed away at me.

I had been slowly packing up what little dregs of belongings I had around the apartment that you wouldn’t miss. A few boxes of books, three suitcases of clothes, and toiletries. I figured I would be able to pick up furniture once I moved in and make the trip in one go.

It was as if nothing had happened at all—and maybe that’s how I preferred it. I was in our room, on the computer researching if anyone had ever been born without a face when I saw your body in the doorway. Since your face had disappeared, you hadn’t tried to engage with me at all. But from rote memory, I looked up and smiled at you. And I was met with a smile reflecting back at me.

“What is it?” you asked me. I must have looked shocked studying the ridges and contours of your face, trying to see if anything had changed.     

“Nothing,” I said, trying to snap out of it. “Just happy to see you.”

You smirked, but I could sense the budding of a blush on your cheeks. Is that the color they always were?

“Happy to see you too,” you said back. I fidgeted with my hands, not sure how to react. Was what I was looking at really you? Or some kind of replacement. I noticed a slight angle to your eyes, a mismatched symmetry between your nostrils. Something wasn’t right. And my suspicions were confirmed when, after a few beats of silence, you asked me—

“Do you need any help packing?”

Autumn Laws is a former writing teacher turned nonprofit and healthcare marketer. Her work has previously appeared in Stone of Madness Press, ReCap Magazine, and Self+Culture+Writing: Autoethnography for/as Writing Studies. When she's not blaming the moon for her breakup, she loves to knit, bake, and watch reality television.