A Sun Streaked In Red

CONTAINS SENSITIVE CONTENT:

Mental health

Physical violence/gore

Mentions of substance abuse

A Sun Streaked In Red

It began with the thunder and ended with the rain; everyone knows the sky is the bringer of Armageddon. Through our fingers we threaded the cloud like tendrils of cigarette smoke, that one last high before the ashes fell. It was a glorious maelstrom.

And, like all good things, it tore us apart.

"Set me free," Ellie prayed to the raindrops racing down our window. "Just let me fly like the birds for one day in my life."

I scowled and twisted my scarf tighter. "They can't hear you. No one can. That's why we're still here." This old brick block glued hastily down to the dry dirt like a glue stick and loose squares of Kindergarten paper. Papa says we've been here since the Earth was young. I used to laugh him off whenever he'd say it. But now… 

"Do you think he's right?" Ellie blinked. Her eyes were thicker than honey but nowhere near as warm. "Papa." I turned to the window, "Do you think we've really been here..."

"Since the dawn of time?" She might've snorted and shrugged the thought away, but when the lightning flashed, it illuminated a pale gray face. "We could," but it was heavy. Dark. I should've known then what she was really saying. "Maybe we were the first. Maybe we could be the first again."

I scoffed, "We can't be the first again at anything."

"Sure you can. Ma always liked to say it, anyway. There was one time she..."

Whatever Ellie had to say about her Ma didn't matter–--why had her mouth twisted like that? What was she squinting at between the raindrops?

Like I said: it began with the thunder. A punctuation at the beginning of a sentence, something thick and flat and made of too many faces to count.

Too many bodies to count.

"Elindra, what have you DONE?!"

She spun around at my horrified scream. My sword fell. Hers raised. In seconds, the tip was at my throat and her blood was on my shirt. 

"We can be the first," she said coolly, a glittering smile popping like fireworks. Like bones. Like joints spun too far in any direction. "We can," and her eyes shone so brilliantly I almost didn't smell the red dripping from her hair. 

Rain slid under my boots. I couldn't shrink back into anything but a wall. Ellie had always been good at cornering me in the hallway between classes---before the halls blew apart and the whole ceiling came down. So much destruction, I thought right then. And all for what?

"...All for what?" Ellie flicked her lips up in a smooth smile. I must've spoken aloud. "What more could we possibly need, Eden?" Throwing an arm out for a grand gesture, "This is all we have. It's all there ever was. If we had more..."

"Ellie." The sword inched ever so slightly deeper into my neck.

"If we had more, someone else would have to have less."

Another inch. Another rivulet of blood coursing down my neck. "Ellie!"

She lifted her eyes to the sky, that great swirling pool of cloud and smoke and feathering flame. A small whisper was all she gave—"I don't think I can take anymore."—but it was larger than life in the yawning chasm of death between us.

I laughed in spite of myself, in spite of the blood pouring from my skin. "If you can't take anymore, why did you ever steal it in the first place?"

But I knew. Dropping to the gravel, kneeling over my own pyre, I knew: she did it for the same reason anyone has ever sought rebirth at the foot of their grave.

To take back control.

Don’t take their body, or their life, or their heart—take their name. Take every letter they’ve been built upon and rip it apart, in pieces, so when they look for their soul, all they find is the crumpled aftertaste of a story that will never be savored again. Rearrange the syllables into something gnarled and fermented. Poison the curve of every vowel until the smooth edges fray and split, leaving only a desiccated husk; a carcass. 

A body can heal. But a name?

A name can destroy.

The sky shook, but not in the way a tree shakes, or a car engine chokes, or a river shivers under glass snow—the sky shook under all the weight of the bodies it held. When the sun came up, it was a sun streaked in red and buried in gray silk. When the rain stopped, it halted with a force so strong it nearly blew the stars to smithereens. 

"I haven't seen the sun in a long time."

I clawed through the grass—through the fire and the gravel and the dust—and fell into a demented husk beside her. She took my hand, but only I had the strength to lace our fingers. "I haven't seen the sun in a long time,” she repeated. “Was it always…?" 

"It was," and I laughed and laughed and laughed. Ellie smiled brokenly up at me. Our tears didn't run together but our blood did, all the endless bouts of it, the sunlight leaking softly from our tattered skin. I was insane; she was lovely. Her blonde hair crowned her head like a crumpled halo. 

An angel, I thought as a sense of peace settled over me. Or a bird. Flying free like a bird one day in her life…

…The last day. 

So maybe we weren't the first.

But we were the last. We are the stories the New Earth's children will tell their children one day; we are the legends.

I fell onto her. She held my body to hers, I pressed her heart to mine, and she guided our lips together. Whether right or wrong, we fell asleep in each other's arms. Some would say we were each other's Reapers in disguise waiting to embrace. Others would imagine we were two halves of a whole put back together after hundreds of lost years.

Or maybe we were just totally, unequivocally, irreparably broken.

Everything is more beautiful when it's broken.

Especially the rain.

It began with the thunder.

It ended with the rain.