"The Sun Goes Out For Exactly Three Seconds Every Day At Noon" Creepypasta

Out past the last row in the sage, in good coats, were four people from the observatory.

Dr. Helen Sarno ran the site.

She was 54, gray, hands folded.

Priya Raman ran their instruments, and a tall man whose name I didn't have yet, and Emmett Kwan, 29, 18 months of volunteer fire crew, and a stool of his own in the Ruby, our bar.

April of last year, the Deckers' barn caught fire at 2:00 in the morning.

Emmett was in there four hours in a borrowed coat with a hose in his hands, and I was next to him.

Once you've done that with a man in this county, there's a way of talking to him afterwards.

Nobody had told those four to stand out in the sage.

They'd have been welcome further in.

But when 600 people arrange themselves by a rule nobody could explain, and you don't know the rule, you end up at the edge.

Then everybody looks at where you're standing and thinks, "Well, that's about right." Somebody had invited them.

I've never found out who.

They'd had three years of standing at the end of a bar.

Then in the second week of January, Sherry, who runs the Ruby, moved the two-top by the window, set it for 4:00, and told them it was theirs.

Nobody voted on that.

It happened the way weather happens, and every soul in that building understood what it meant.

They were nearly through.

Another year, maybe two, and they'd be as accepted as outsiders can be.

The wind came up out of the west across the flat, and everybody put their hands in their pockets.

And I got a smell of cut alfalfa, strong, green, wet, the way a field smells in June an hour after the swath has been through.

It was the 8th of January.

There's nothing green above ground for 40 miles.

I turned into the wind looking for a truck, a trailer, anything.

Sage, road, gray ground.

Then it was gone, and the priest was talking again.