Midnight at Noon: Part 2
A short story on how a solar eclipse changed the lives of four people forever
Preface: This story was published in my first-ever literary work — On a Lot of Things: A Collection of Original Short Stories. The story was inspired by my experience witnessing a solar eclipse for the first time. The day was the 3rd of October and the year was 2004. Almost twenty years later, it is the morning of another solar eclipse, and the memories return.
As the aged man shuffled onto the balcony, his bottle-thick lenses sitting on the tip of his nose, the young woman’s heart dropped to the regions of her feet, as it usually did anytime her ‘husband’ approached. She had not expected the tortoise to live this long. When she chose to marry him, he looked like a wraith waiting to be severed from the leash of mortality, but five years down the line, even though he grew more wraith-like, the old man did not appear to be in a hurry to leave this temporal realm.
At first she had tried to restrain her libido, but with time, her underutilised body started to yearn for more than what the aged man could offer. Like the eclipse they said would happen by midday, the old man, who appeared to be omnipresent, cast a huge shadow over her freedom and her youth. She had become just another decoration in the house. He did not allow her…
