Whose Dwelling is the Light of Setting Suns

I was warned as a child that looking directly at the sun would result in the retinas being burned out of my skull. That they would be fried like onions, sizzling unfunnily in vitreous humour. Nobody ever identified the point at which it was not only safe, but positively medicinal to look directly at the sun. Rays robbed of retina sauteing power by virtue of travelling on an angled path through the atmosphere now painted me in the same milky peach as the few thin, gilt-edged clouds that teased over the horizon. She was next to me, but would not be for long. The medicine was not strong enough. I sat on the edge of the bed, my weight pulling the clean sheets tight over her thin legs. The peach-milk light leaked onto them giving everything a healthy flesh tone, pouring the outside world into the never-dark room of tubes and softly pulsing electronic sounds. 

“I was always told I shouldn’t look directly at the sun,” I said.

Just a weak smile in response. She shifted her back slightly against her bank of pillows, attempting to alleviate a pain she would never be free of again.

It was visibly dropping now. The descent had become visible as soon as the disc’s lower edge had breached the cloud-muddled horizon. Time appeared to have accelerated.

“I don’t want it to be over.” I took her hand, tanned by the sun when both it and she were younger and stronger. It was passive now, the practical grip gone, but still beautiful and smooth. The sun was holding us in its orbit and the gravity of its daily demise, the last she would see, was pulling a lump into my throat. The soft, healthy light had moved up the bed and now the sheets returned to clinical white in the weak electric half-light.

“No. I don’t want to go,” she said, raising her other hand with a marionette swing and resting it on mine, holding hers, “but it’s ok.”

“It’s not fair.” Pathetic. The lie of a lifetime of self-proclaimed stoicism revealed as the first tear welled.

“No, but it’s only as unfair as it is for everyone else.” She wheezed at her own joke, the oxygen line extending her Cheshire cat grin literally, laterally, from ear to ear. Would it remain when she disappeared?

A nurse pressed buttons and the electric sounds were gone.

“Let me know if there is anything else I can do for you,” said the nurse.

“Thank you,” she said.

A machine was unplugged and wheeled away.  

The sun threw out rays over the valley, anchors to slow its sinking and hold its top third above the rising horizon, but they slipped over the fields and hedge-hemmed roads, failing to find purchase. It tried to leave part of itself in the windows of a distant house, glinting and bright, a memory of its blinding power, but the spark soon faded and the house watched on from its hillside with black eyes. Maybe from where the house sat the spark could be seen lingering in the windows of the hospital, in rows above and below where we waited? Us, just another temporary star in a pixellated matrix.

“It’s the end of the holidays. The kids should be back at school tomorrow.”

“Do you think they’ll remember me?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“It’s just that after all of these years my memory has basically edited my grandparents down to a pipe smoke stain on the ceiling and a recipe for lasagne with cabbage in it.” 

“Exactly, both of them remembered. What do you think you’ll be?”

“What do I hope they’ll remember, or what do I think they’ll actually remember?”

“Hope.”

“Helping them learn to read.”

“Actually though?”

“More likely they’ll remember the two years when we didn’t have a TV.”

“No doubt in my mind.”

We both laughed, life and death briefly harmonising before my laugh met a sob in my throat and hers crashed into a globular cough.

The sun was nearly gone, flushed red with the effort of hanging on. Only a portion equivalent that which you would slice off the top of a boiled egg was still visible, just enough to fit a soldier of toast in.

“I would do anything if we could have one more minute,” I said. “I think if someone could give us one more minute then I’d be happy to go with you when our time was up.”

She was transfixed by the last orange rays painting a premature autumn onto the tops of the valley’s trees. “What would be the point in one more minute?”

“Over the horizon that same sun is young and yellow above a round ocean. Somewhere else it’s just about to push the first blue tint of a new day over the silver floor of a black night. We could spend one more minute together, in the light, while everything happens, all at once.”

“One more minute,” she said, watching the slipping sun through half closed eyes.

The nurse was back, wheeling a machine of wires and screens on a tall chrome pole.

“One more minute?” said the nurse.

I looked at her, slumped against her pillows. Her papery eyelids were closed. Her beautiful mouth slightly open as if poised to speak.

“I would be ready to go myself, go with her, if we could just have one more minute,” I said.

The nurse plugged the machine in and tapped at its small screen. Her face was lit by the bright green readout, which overpowered the fading afterglow of the now vanished sun. The nurse checked her watch and pressed one last button, smiled at me and walked out of the room, closing the door behind her. The machine’s small screen showed 1:00. The numbers on the screen did not change and for a moment their green light was the strongest in the room, until a faint red glow began to kindle around us.

I looked back at the bed. Her mouth was closed. Open eyes smiled into mine and then looked out of the window at the rising sunset. The anchors were thrown out over the valley once more and the sun was hauled back above the horizon, igniting the thin clouds as it reheated from the red of its death to raging orange. As peach-milk painted the room again there was weight once more in her smooth brown hands.

The machine gave a soft bleep and I looked to its screen. 0:59.

We looked at each other as the sun began to reset.

0:51

“How do you think the boys will remember me?” I asked.

“The TV thing,” she said with a grin. 

We laughed and squeezed our hands together and looked only at each other as the light withdrew and night fell.