Eight minutes and Twenty Seconds

There had been no warning that the light was going to go out. In all the sci-fi doomsday movies they know it's going to happen, or at least know something bad is about to happen. An Earthquake, eclipse, or the scientist warning the United Nations that imminent doom is pending. Nothing like that, it was just like someone flicked the switch and “click” it was late twilight. The moon disappeared from the sky even though we think it was traveling along with us in our wake. Without the sun's light, we also lost its gravity, and we were now flung out into space at sixty-seven thousand miles per hour into the galaxy. The milky way was stretched out alongside us now in a permanent swatch of splattered starlight. Jackson Pollock had just taken one long draw of starlight paint and splattered it across the midnight sky, and most was splattered in a straight line but many splashes were going what would be north and south on his black canvas.

I had saved the pictures of a child. My childhood was composed of myself, cats, dogs, birds, some buildings, and other random things. I had only one picture of my mother and only one of my father. They were always around so why did I need a picture to remember them by. We had gone to the county fair last fall and my father bought me a heart-shaped hollo locket. It would upload photos with Bluetooth and depending on the quality you could have up to twenty different pictures saved. It was about two inches across and had a center projection heart that was about one inch. The dark ruby red outer ring would collect the sunlight to power the projector, which was the almost clear diamond-like center projection heart. With a twist of the wrist, it would change pictures that were translucent holograms. They appeared six inches tall and would be as wide as your hand with the projector laying in your palm. You could turn your hand to see all angles of the projection or show others the front. Depending on the resolution of the picture and display of the hologram also determined how many you could keep in the memory. The higher the resolution the fewer the pictures. I had managed to fill up the memory of the hollo heart, twenty pictures. It had been a novelty fair prize that my father had won almost as soon as we got to the fair and the attendant took our picture and loaded it up right away so we could see it already done and walk around the fair showing it off to others and hopefully driving him more contestants. “Now remember, it will only charge in sunlight, photosynthesis. You only have eight minutes and twenty seconds to look at the pictures and it also takes as long to charge as you have looked at it. So… if you look at it for two minutes, it will take two minutes to recharge. It won’t lose power unless you look at it and the only way to charge it is in the natural sunlight.” Seemed pretty simple if not restrictive. The whole novelty of eight minutes and twenty seconds was to symbolize the time it took sunlight to reach the Earth, always a reminder of how short and precious time was.

I was down to five pictures now. I had tried to remember what I had pictures of and then as quickly as possible delete each one that had no importance or relevance. To load pictures, you just linked your mobile phone device to the heart and uploaded the pictures you had selected, but you could not look at which pictures were already loaded to the device. To delete a picture, I had to open the hologram image and then push in the middle heart till it blinked three times, then it was gone. Three cats, four dogs, five buildings, and three bird pictures had been deleted. This left me my first picture, me and my dad. The other pictures were of my mom by herself in her blue sunflower dress which was belted at the waist with a green sash, my brother and myself, our beagle dog sitting on the couch and our cat laying in an open window.

I don’t know how much time I had left now, it didn’t have a timer or count down clock, it would just stop working after the eight twenty. I think I had at least seven and a half minutes left or about seven minutes and thirty seconds. I decided that I had to convert how I thought about my usage and converted it all to seconds. Five hundred seconds less thirty to forty-five or about two to three seconds per picture deletion left me with four hundred seventy to four hundred fifty-five. This made me feel better, hundreds of seconds seem like more than single minutes. Of course, I hadn’t considered the first wave of preview looks which took at least two seconds each, so that was another forty seconds gone. Four hundred and fifteen left? I could only look at them in chronological order also, the first picture was followed by the second and then the third and so on. So, I should take another five to ten for each picture I had to skip to get to the one I wanted to delete. Four hundred and five-ish?

“Let me look at the pictures again please” my younger brother and I had been left behind at the county armory where families had gathered after the first darkness. We didn’t call it a blackout because all the electricity still worked, just the sky went dark, we had electricity and our cars still ran on gas for the engines. All the solar power was gone though, I guess you could say naturally, but who would have guessed the sun would go out.

“I’ll let you look in a while. I haven’t even looked since we deleted all the silly nonsense pictures.” I knew how limited my treasure was, my brother had no clue. He even thought it was just a really long night so far. It had been four days. I could keep track on my mobile phone since we were able to keep recharging from the armory’s electrical outlets. I read short articles or watched very short news stories about what was being referred to as the “event”. What I basically understood was that the sun had gone out, they didn’t know how or why, and we were flying through space since we lost the gravitational pull of the sun.

It was beginning to get colder outside, the news stories I read predicted this. The adults at the armory went outside less and less and began stockpiling supplies in a corner of the large armory gymnasium. They were frequently seen together meeting, until about the fifth morning.

“Listen up everyone” the mayor of the town had taken sanctuary in the armory and was now the leader of our castaway group.

“We are going to move to a new location outside of town. We need you to dress as warm as possible and carry as little…. So,… put on all your clothes and fill all your pockets with whatever you think you might need. Please don’t bring anything that won’t be useful, we won’t have room for it in the long run.” He closed out his speech with a broad wave of his arm and shaking his head as he looked down into his hand and buried his face into it.

“What’s going on? I don’t understand. Why do I have to put on all my clothes and leave all my stuff behind?” my brother was becoming inconsolable. His blue eyes now had the same distressed blue my mom’s eyes had when they left us behind four days ago.

“How will mom and dad find us? Are they going to tell them where we have gone?” he was shaking and becoming inconsolable. His breath was shallow and quick, and he clung to me.

“Listen and look at me” I faced him square in front of me and almost nose to nose “we are going to be calm and listen to what they tell us to do. I’m sure they are taking us to a safer and warmer place. We wouldn’t leave here unless we had to. Mom and dad would expect us to be calm and steady.” I almost had him, “when we get to wherever we are going I will show you my pictures again.” With that, he calmed down, wiped his face dry and took my hand when I held it out.

We were ushered over to a car with a back door that was open waiting for us to get in. The driver looked back at all of us “All set kids? Off on another adventure. Were going to follow the cars in front of us till we get to where we are going. It’s somewhere outside of town and shouldn’t take too long to get there.” With that, he turned back around, looked at the three other adults in the front bench seat and declared “here we go” shifted into drive and the car lunged forward.

The other kids had fallen asleep early in the ride. We had been driving for over an hour in the dark with only the light of the car from behind us shining through the back window and the dashboard light shining on the driver's face. I could feel my anxiety building up in me since we began the road trip. My mind was racing now and about where we were going and how long it had been dark and how quickly it was getting colder outside. I had decided that the only way to calm myself was to look at my pictures, just really quick and alone. Since we were wearing all we could wear I simply took off my outer coat and cloaked it over me from the front so I was hidden from everyone else in the car. I pulled out the heart hologram locket from inside my shirt and pushed in on the center heart to turn it on. It immediately began to show me and my dad, but my dad’s head was cut off by my coat, I didn’t have enough height for the hologram to show. I pushed up my coat with my free hand to show the whole image. I counted to ten for each one and then I pushed in the heart again to turn it off. That was only about fifty seconds which put me at about three hundred and sixty-five.

The stopped car woke me up and I uncovered my head. The cold outside had blasted into the car and the adults were ushering us out and pointing toward an open doorway. It looked like the side of a hill that had been cut in half with a tall rectangle shining lite and letting the silhouettes of people inside. I had been pushing my little brother and the other small kids in front of me through the doorway and down the hallway as I had been pushed from behind by several adults until the last one came through the doorway and the sound of hollow steel banged behind the last person in.

“Ok I’ve been good and we’re finally here, let me see the pictures” My brother and I had found an empty barracks-style bunk and hopped onto it together.

“Ok, but we can only look at them for ten seconds each, understand, and I hold it and will change them after the count of ten.” He nodded his head and murmured “uhhuhu”

I let a couple of them go longer, I think my mom and dad both got sixteen to seventeen seconds. I calculated I had about three hundred seconds or five minutes left for eternity.