Full Orbit by Reece Rowan Gritzmacher
Helga suspected but couldn’t know for sure. Signs abounded, however. Newspaper gone to black and white snowflakes. Scraps disappearing from countertops. Prescriptions with her suddenly omitted address and phone number. As though—no. Every Covergirl was losing her head, but through tender serration, Helga could tell. This care, she was certain of.
Helga had spent one year undisturbed in her new home, an old Victorian with peppermint pink and red trim and a luminous orange sherbert door. Her ice cream house, she called it. Not colors she would have chosen, but she didn’t mind a previous owner’s whimsy. Why not, she had said to everyone—her family, friends, realtor, and friendly neighbors. And for the first year, Helga had been alone. Just her and her calico, Frank.
The spindly curlicued house was a lot for them. Three stories, plus an attic and an intact dumbwaiter. It was her first. The only home she’d ever had for herself, free from the gaze of others, however considerate and well-meaning. She worried about how much control a bank could hold over her life, but her mortgage was smaller than most people’s. Her home was a fix-me-up; projects abounded.
Here, she could practice being herself. Even take off her clothing.
Three seasons were too frigid for any state of undress, but on the first August morning, Helga braved the urge to wear just underwear and an old bra. In this outfit, she painted the downstairs and washed dishes. “This is freedom,” she told Frank, who spent his every waking moment naked, often with his parts on display. He didn’t judge. She kept a doorbell dress in the broom cupboard for unexpected visitors.
The mice allowed her two weeks of nude reverie before they began their project. Late summer, Helga noticed a faint scratching sound from behind the walls. Uncertain of the source, she ran for her button-up dress in the broom cupboard.
For weeks onward, she heard a scritch and scratch here and there. A little scurry. She told herself the other sounds were only in her imagination. The squeak one morning when she brought in the newspaper. Another squeak when the mail dropped through the slot into the foyer.
She knew there were worse problems than hers, if you could call it a problem. The challenge was not knowing what the mice were building.
“Five days until the first total solar eclipse visible across North America since 1979,” her dad told her over the phone. Farther off in the kitchen, her other dad Pa chimed in: “Did you get the glasses we sent?”
“Yeah! I can’t wait to wear them. Thanks, Pa!”
After this, the next solar eclipse would be visible from South America. Folks were being asked to give their paper-and-plastic glasses to Chileans. Helga wanted to be good, but she also wanted to keep staring at the sun. Inadvisable, even with the shades, but she couldn’t restrain herself. Every day, she’d decided, she could gaze upward. Five seconds, ten seconds, fifteen. She wanted to know how long she could behold a god, a real bringer of life. She knew it wasn’t God’s fault the ozone layer was growing threadbare.
The closer the eclipse, the more things disappeared. Her pillowcase tags (nibbled off in the laundry), a little tub of glue, wrapping paper from the attic. She began to scan every room for absence. Frank patrolled with an important air, but she was too kind to tell him she didn’t expect him to stop anything. He was a gentleman. Not accustomed to getting his paws dirty from anything other than dust bunnies. She’d tried to put a GoPro on him once, a purchase she couldn’t afford, but Frank had stared at her in alarm. “Just what do you expect me to do with this,” he’d seemed to ask. She wasn’t certain herself. There wasn’t exactly a door into the walls.
Helga was once a mouse.
Before the ice cream house, she had rented rooms in houses and apartments. Lived with faculty in town eight months of the year, a lab partner, and people from Craigslist. Helga never lived anywhere she could host a family meal or party or plant a garden without asking permission first. She’d even spent three years in a house with parties she wasn’t invited to. Often, she’d emerge from the basement to find bodies packed on the living room sofa and floor. Her shyness would take over. Heart pounding, she’d wave hi, pee in their one bathroom, grab leftovers from her shelf in the fridge, then disappear back down the stairs. She became very good at invisibility.
She understood it.
On August 21, Helga, Frank, and a couple friends gathered on her widow’s walk. All wore their flimsy glasses, except for Frank, who snoozed.
As the moon creeped closer to the sun, her dads called in excitement, yelling over speakerphone: “Are you outside? Are you ready? Here we go!”
Helga held the phone away from her face to save her ears. “Of course, Dad and Pa. I love you!”
“Happy Solar Eclipse, Helga’s Dads!” her friend Jamal yelled into the phone. “Come up here for the next one!”
As they rang off, Helga excused herself for a minute, descending into the attic, then into lower levels. Frank cracked an eye but let her go when she shook her head.
Even in the kitchen she could hear shouts of joy from the roof. Outside her windows, day became night. She tapped the flashlight app on her phone and listened to the walls. Silence. But the dumbwaiter was cracked. She padded across the floor and raised the door.
A hundred suns gleamed. No longer paper, but stars and satellites. Each sun cast off a heat that burned retinas. Moons dangled like icicles. From her pocket, she pulled her cardboard frames.
So this was their project.
“Helga, come here,” Jamal yelled. Her phone buzzed in her pocket.
But as long as she wanted, she’d stare.
Reece Rowan Gritzmacher lives in a Southwest mountain town surrounded by ponderosa pines, but grew up hugging trees in the Pacific Northwest. Their poetry and prose have appeared in Barrelhouse, Drunk Monkeys, Voicemail Poems, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. You can find them at www.reecegritzmacher.com.