Totality Through Time
Copyright© 2026 by Art Samms
Chapter 1
August 12, 2026
Along the north coast of Spain
The light over the Cantabrian Sea was too clean to belong to an ordinary afternoon. It spread itself across the whitewashed buildings of Luarca in wide, forgiving strokes, catching on red-tiled roofs and the bobbing masts in the harbor below. The sky was an unmarred blue, the kind photographers pray for and rarely get on command. There was nary a veil of cloud in sight.
I stood on the low stone wall overlooking the water, camera strap tight around my wrist, and let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.
Clear skies. After everything.
Luarca had seemed like a gamble when I’d traced the center line of totality across a map months ago. The eclipse would cut a diagonal shadow across northern Spain, and this small fishing town—folded into the cliffs like an afterthought—sat almost perfectly beneath the longest duration of darkness. Four minutes and twenty-two seconds, if the calculations held. I’d memorized that number the way some people memorize anniversaries.
From where I stood, I could see the marina crowded with small boats and the breakwater curving protectively around them. Beyond it, the Atlantic stretched flat and metallic, flashing silver when the sun struck it just right. The tide breathed in and out against the rocks below. Gulls wheeled lazily overhead, shrieking as if offended by the attention the sun was about to lose.
I adjusted the settings on my camera again, though I’d already done it a dozen times since lunch. It was a flagship mirrorless body—more computing power in my hands than had guided astronauts to the moon. I’d paired it with a solar filter, triple-checked the ND rating, programmed exposure brackets for the moments before and after totality. It was overkill, probably. But if the sky was going to split open for four minutes, I intended to be ready.
I lifted the viewfinder to my eye and framed the harbor. A test shot. The click of the shutter was soft and precise, a mechanical whisper. Perfect histogram. The light was steady, almost complacent.
I lowered the camera and glanced at my phone. 1:14 p.m. First contact wouldn’t occur for another hour.
I’d left Houston three days earlier—an overnight flight to Madrid, a bleary connection to Asturias, then a rental car I’d driven along narrow coastal roads that coiled like ribbon through green hills and sleepy villages. I’d told myself I enjoyed solo travel. The freedom of it. The silence.
The truth was simpler: there hadn’t been anyone to invite.
I had colleagues, of course. Clients. Acquaintances who liked my work enough to sign contracts and then ask for more glass, more steel, more rentable square footage. But no one who would take a week off to stand under a shadow with me.
Houston had felt heavier every year. The skyline I helped shape glittered impressively at dusk—rectangular prisms reflecting one another into infinity. Efficient, profitable, and soulless. I had spent the last decade designing towers that could have existed anywhere. Glass skins stretched tight over steel bones, optimized for cost and climate, stripped of ornament in the name of progress.
When I was younger, I used to sketch arches and courtyards in the margins of my notebooks. I studied cathedrals the way other kids studied baseball stats. I believed buildings could carry emotion. That they could mean something.
Somewhere along the way, I traded that belief for billable hours.
A group of tourists passed behind me, their voices bright and quick in Spanish. One of them laughed, the sound skipping across the stone like a pebble. I watched them for a moment—two couples, maybe late twenties, each with eclipse glasses already perched on their heads. They had the easy choreography of shared history: inside jokes, hands brushing without thinking.
I felt, sharply and unexpectedly, like an extra in someone else’s photograph.
I hadn’t always been alone. There had been someone once who tolerated my habit of stopping mid-walk to photograph light slanting through a stairwell. Someone who said she loved how I saw the world. But she’d wanted roots, and I’d offered deadlines. She’d wanted warmth; I’d given her blueprints.
I shifted my weight and looked back at the sea.
Traveling alone had become a habit I wore like a tailored suit. It fit well enough from a distance. It impressed people in passing conversation—”Spain? For the eclipse? That’s incredible.” I’d nod, smile, mention the center line of totality as if it were a pilgrimage route.
But standing here now, with the sky wide open and the air warm against my skin, I felt the absence like an echo.
I imagined what it would be like to turn and hand the camera to someone, to say, “Look at this,” and have them understand why the light mattered. To feel her hand slip into mine when the sky went dark.
Instead, I had titanium alloy and firmware updates.
The harbor bell clanged somewhere below, a dull, resonant note. I glanced toward the sun, high and indifferent above the town. In a few hours, the moon would slide perfectly between us and that burning sphere—geometry so precise it felt like choreography. For a brief, improbable interval, day would surrender to night.
Totality.
That was what I’d come for. Not the partial phases, not the crescent bites taken slowly from the sun. I wanted the moment when the world tipped into something unrecognizable. When the temperature dropped and the birds fell silent and the sky burned at its edges.
Four minutes and twenty-two seconds.
I lifted the camera again, this time pointing it upward, careful not to look directly at the sun without the filter engaged. Through the viewfinder, the disk was a white coin in an endless field of blue, static and untouchable.
Soon, it would not be.
A breeze came off the water, carrying salt and diesel and something faintly sweet from the cafés along the promenade. I closed my eyes and let it wash over me.
Maybe this was what I’d been missing—not another project, not another client, but alignment. Something larger than steel and zoning permits. Something that made the smallness of my own life feel deliberate instead of accidental.
I opened my eyes and checked the time again.
Still early. Still bright. Above Luarca, the sun shone with complete confidence, unaware that in a matter of hours, it would be swallowed whole. At least from our perspective.
Feeling restless, I left the overlook and followed the narrow road down toward the harbor. The camera tapped lightly against my chest with each step. The waterfront had grown louder in the last hour. Vendors had set up folding tables with eclipse glasses and bottled water. Someone had dragged out a portable speaker, and tinny pop music drifted over the slap of halyards against masts.
Clusters of tourists lined the breakwater now, angling their phones skyward as if the moon might arrive early out of politeness.
I slipped past them, hugging the edge of the quay where the fishing boats were tied up shoulder to shoulder. Their hulls were painted in fading blues and greens, names hand-lettered in white script. Nets lay heaped like sleeping animals on the decks. The air smelled of brine and diesel and old rope.
That was when I heard them.
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