"So how long do you think we've got?" she asked between spoonfuls of New York Super Fudge Chunk under the pecan tree. The boys were in bed. Cicadas whined in the mesquite. The sun reddened as it descended in the west. Whiro, now easily visible to the naked eye, filled most of the lower half of the orb. If not for its geometric outline, it might have been mistaken for a passing cloud.
"How long?" he said. "If it blocks out the sun completely? I dunno. Three days? Three weeks?"
"So fast." It was a whisper, almost lost in the rustle of pecan leaves.
"Yeah. My best guess, anyway. Yesterday's high was a hundred degrees. The low this morning was seventy-five. Twenty-five degrees in twelve hours. Fifty degrees a day." He paused. "Do you really want to talk about this?"
"Yes. I'd rather know."
"I'm just guessing. It might not be that fast," he said. "The moisture in the air will come out as rain then maybe snow, giving up heat to the air as it does. But with no sunlight to drive evaporation, eventually the rain and snow will stop. With no water vapor to trap the heat, it will get really cold after that."
The sun sank into a strip of clouds, hidden in the haze near the horizon, and the bottom half disappeared completely. He took small bites of his ice cream, trying to make it last. "The oceans have a lot of stored heat," he said. "That will slow things down some, until they ice over."
The sky was a smooth gradient of color: bright, primary red at the horizon, deep indigo through the pinnate canopy above them. They sat wordless as the band of red narrowed and deepened, the yellows and oranges faded, and the vast curtain of indigo descended. The cicadas eventually turned over their song to the crickets. He had always loved this time of evening, when the angry sun retired and the heat of the day radiated back from the ground. The warm tireless breeze washed over them and wrapped them in its embrace, drying the day's sweat.
"Not sure we're gonna get this one back over the net," he said.
"I dunno," she said. "Still a lot of things could happen. Maybe it won't unfold all the way. Or maybe it will break. Our spaceships fail sometimes, why do we assume this thing is any better? Maybe it flies away on the solar wind."
She was quiet for a long while. "Or maybe, sometimes, there's just nothing you can do. Maybe we get reincarnated as aliens. Or we wake up in christian heaven, and we get to see the face of god." As she spoke she looked out at the horizon, now just a deep band of blue and indigo under a black sky.
He reached for her hand, but his own was trembling and he withdrew before she saw it. "I'm not prepared to accept that," he said. "It's... it's everyone."
"It was always everyone. Even if that thing had never come. Everyone alive today is going to die," she said.
"But not this week," he said. "Not the boys." He reached out to her again.
This time, she turned and took his hand in both of hers. "Oh baby, yes. Eventually, them too. And honestly, I wonder if that's not worse, knowing that someday I'll die and leave them to face the hardest part of their lives alone."
"Not alone! They'd have each other. And wives, or husbands maybe. Children. Grandchildren."
"Maybe. Maybe not," she said. "For sure, one of them would have to go first, leaving the other."
Pain in his throat from holding down a sob. "What do we say to them?"
"What we always tell them. Everything will be all right."
"It's a lie."
"It's the truth. It will be alright because we make it alright."
The pecan leaves hung down like a tattered valance above the emerging stars, the leaves as black as nothing.
"Do you really believe what you said before?" he said. "Reincarnation? The face of god?"
"I don't know. I can't imagine not being. When I try, I'm still there, the mind's eye that's doing the imagining."
She was quiet a long time.
"I think what I believe," she said, looking out again at the horizon, "is that each life is a finite thing. As it gets longer it doesn't necessarily get bigger or better. It just kind of zooms out. More stuff with less detail."
