"I Am The Setting Sun" ("I Am The Setting Sun")

“We” she slams her notebook and a few sheets clumped together onto the table, “are running out of time.”

She stands across from me with her hands splayed on the table and I stare at her with even, if a little bit sleep blurred, eyes. I sip my tea.

“Running out of time to do what exactly?”

“To get back at my groomer, I’ve finally figured out what I want to do.”

“Well,” I take another careful sip, awakening with each word that she says, “that’s one hell of a way to start the day.”

…

“So what you’re saying is that you want to out him.”

She huffs and rolls her eyes in her usual childish way and kicks her legs off the edge of my bed. “It’s a bit more complicated than that.” She sits up a little straighter, “I am going to get into his head and make him so afraid of me ruining his life that he ends up outing himself.”

I set myself right besides her so that our knees touch. She shifts to be facing me.

“And how do you plan on doing that?”

“Oh! I have a plan!!” she skips off the bed, “So first we’re gonna drive to his home town right? Because I have his address and yeah okay, it’s been a year and then some but judging from all his socials and his girlfriends' socials they still live in the same place so-”

“You have his girlfriend's socials too?” she stops and her face turns so deadly serious that the first trickle of understanding flows through me.

“I had to be sure.”

I take her in with my eyes, and notice how she somehow looks less of a ghost, her skin has warmed again but the blueness around her eyes remains. They’ve gotten darker recently.

“So anyway, we go down there right and we just walk in like ‘What’s poppin’ shit lips we’re down here for a thingy but don’t want to pay for a hotel room so we’re using your house instead and you better comply or else I’m gonna tell everyone that you know and care about that you like to play with little girls’ and that should keep us there for about a week.”

“I’m noticing a lot of we’s and us’s in this plan of yours.”

“Well yeah I-” she stops pacing with her arms hanging by her sides, “you are coming with me, aren’t you?”

I notice her notebook from earlier behind where she sat and I reach for it, leaf through it, skim through the little notes here and there and the list of names she’s drawn up with their socials and connections to him and all. She really has thought of everything. I leaf through it some more and realize that she’s even worked out how much gas money we’ll need to get there and back. I close it quietly and look back at her.

“Well, I suppose someone has to be there to keep you from physically strangling him.”

She smiles at me then, high and wide and if you didn’t know her you’d think she was just ecstatic. Joy to the point of becoming delirious but I know her, I’ve known her before that man got her, that vile disgusting man with clear blue eyes that gave nothing, and I saw how bad she got with him, that man, and how much worse she became after him. 

She smiles at me and beneath it I catch something. Something that she’s not telling me.

…

We leave that same week, on a Friday to be precise, at around 5:30 pm to still be able to catch some sunlight but enjoy the increasingly emptying streets as everyone goes out or goes home. She insisted on loading the car.

“Is there a reason why you now chose to put your plan into motion?” I glance to my right where she seems to be sitting quite comfortably with a little pillow against her back, a blanket covering her legs and in her arms this little stuffed squid thing. It’s got eight legs so I guess it’s more of a squid than an octopus. She’s quiet.

The quiet stretches so long that I think she won’t answer until she pipes up very suddenly. “He spoke to me again a couple of months ago.”

It takes everything in me to keep the car steady on the road.

“What did he want?”

“A promise to keep quiet.”

“And what did you say?”

Another pause. There are vines and decaying leaves skirting the edges of her voice as I see her lip curl out of the corner of my eye.

“I promised him a reckoning.”

…

The drive is the longest one we’ve taken so far, stretching to about a day and a half to which we have to split up a bit or else I’ll end up falling asleep at the wheel and “crush all hope of my vengeance” as she put it, so we end up in some motel after a whole night and morning driving. She had the room reserved just in time.

I feign sleep to watch her out of the crack between my arms and my pillow. There is a very specific look of anguish written on her face, it’s so painful it’s almost sweet.

Most nights I do my level best to push away the very persistent memories of the time she spent with that man, the Blue-Eyed Devil. Nenna was her term of endearment.

Her Nenna.

His endearments came in the form of split nails and ruined sheets.

…

I wait for her to fall asleep. She cried a bit when I was faking it. She wept so hard I thought it would break her ribs with how well she kept from making noise, but I felt her. These heart-wrenching, lung-bursting sobs that remind me of back then. When it was all over. He’d left her and she was so crushed by it, like taking the armature out of a wax figure. She was never the same after that, not that she remained the same during it.

She was quiet for a long time. Always sighing, always sleeping but it was never enough. Never restful. There were times when I’d have to stay with her to keep her hands at her sides. 

I never understood the weight of her loss until she came clean one night. When the smog of her love finally cleared up enough to realize the complete horror of what he’d done to her. And after her love then came grief, her neverending battle with the roiling waves of shame and disgust that he had left her with until finally, the only thing that remained in her was rage. It was strange and in a way terrifying to see such a little body, one that was always filled to the brim with smiles and affection for everyone be so full of incandescent fury. It polluted her, corroding her insides and it was like another person living inside of her. One that became completely obsessed with the thought of ruining him. “Taking back the life he stole” is what she would tell me time and time again once the hours stretched on and on and she’d become worn out with it all.

I gaze at her sleeping face and ache with how at peace she looks. I leave the bed and go to her things. I search through her bag until I come across a little sketchbook covered in stickers and doodles everywhere. What aren’t you telling me? 

I glance behind me to make sure she’s still asleep and begin looking through it. There are half finished portraits and other designs and doodles but then I get to the middle. There’s red everywhere, red eyes and pencil marks and scratches and lyrics from songs that I recognize, and they’re all strung together in a way that shouldn’t work but does.

Eyes blue and hollow, as it rains against their will

The thief of the year, steal every heart of the boys that you’re touching

He holds my body in his arms, and he cries and he cries

I take flight when you hold me, is that how you show me, what it’s like to be loved? 

Cause I tried, but I lied

I lied

I Am The Setting Sun

I Am The Setting Sun

I Am The Setting Sun

I have a loaded gun.

…

We make it onto the main highway that leads to his hometown and she insists that she drive the rest of the way there. We are quiet except for the music that streams softly out of the speakers. The radio sings of obsession and broken teeth. I can feel the weight of what she’s keeping from me.

“Carmencita…” I begin, that’s what I used to call her when I knew I needed to speak with her extra gently. She doesn’t react.

I try again, a bit more firmly, “My Carmen.”

“Yes?”

“Have you lied to me?”

She does not flinch nor does she take her eyes away from the road. I can see the wheels turning in her mind, I can see her thinking about lying again.

“Please don’t try to lie to me.”

Her shoulders begin to hitch up to her ears as the muscles in her back tense up. I trace the veins in her hands, her lovely limpid hands.

“We’re not coming to out him, are we?”

She says nothing and continues to drive.

…

I make her pullover at some gas station unbuckling myself as she does so. I get out as soon as we’ve parked.

She rolls down the window, “Where are you going?”

“I won’t go with you unless you tell me what’s going on. Now, I’m going to ask you again, have you lied to me?”

She stares at me through the window and I see that flash of anguish from before and her response comes so quietly, like the softest little wind, “Yes.”

The beginnings of ice begin to crawl its way through me, starting with the tips of my fingers, “Are you going to kill him?”

She continues to stare at me as the truth leaks from her sunset eyes.

…

She told me how she’d do it, back when she realized what had happened to her. When her hate was all that she was. She told me that she would start with his hands, artist hands, with their nimble ivory fingers that connect up to the most gorgeous of wrists. Wrists that nearly snapped when they were put against her.

She wanted his hands, then his arms. His lovely mouth, the teeth hidden inside.

“I want his eyes.” she’d say as she’d cry some more, reddening hers, “I want his eyes I want his eyes.”

“Then take his eyes.”

“He took my voice,” she told me once when she was sick with grief.

“Then take his voice.”

“I want his life.”

“How would you do it?”

“With my hands.”

I hummed, petting her hair, “Then take his life.”

She sighed then, curling into me, honest eyes up, sad eyes down, “Will you take his with me?” 

I promised her that I would.

Back when it was still just words. When everything was still sleep-soaked and childish, covered in decaying moss and rotting ferns. Back when I would say anything to her, make any promise, bring down any star, just so she would be okay enough to see another day.

…

Our car turns into a neighborhood that looks like the ones on tv. There are trees and picket fences and fake families with plastered smiles. We park a couple of houses away. I know this because I’ve seen pictures of his glued all over her notebook. Pictures and blueprints with notes where all possible exits are.

“Carmen.”

She says nothing.

“Lenore.”

She says nothing.

“Dolores.”

A shiver.

“I cannot go with you. Not for this.”

“You promised me.” Her voice is changing, curling up at the fringes like moth wings in flame.

My mouth opens to reply but she cuts me off, “Did you lie to me?” Her voice is sharpening, growing deeper.

“They’ll send you to jail.”

“Only if we succeed.”

“There is no we!”

“Then why are you still here?!” she screams at me. She has never screamed at me before. “You don’t know what he did. You don’t understand-”

“You’ll ruin your life.”

Her voice dims, “It’s already ruined.”

I look at the houses lined up against us. I think about her, and him, and I think about how we got landed here. In a world where this is her last option. Our breaths fill the quiet. The sun shines against our mirrors and there are birds chirping and children playing and I think about them too. How she was like them when they met, how sweet she was. I think about all he took from not only her but from me. Her laughter, the dreams she’d recount, her musical voice that would filter through the house.

Everything.

Everything.

“We’ll only take enough to make him hurt.”

“Like his hands?”

“And nothing more.”

She sits back in her seat with her hands on her lap. Her left ring finger is painted black, the rest are white.

“And nothing more.” she echoes.

…

The walk to his house feels longer than the drive. Each step a mile and every quirk in the road feels like something that’ll twist fate against us. I notice her walking strangely, a slight drag in her step, and her shadow falters as she reaches for my hand. The house nears. Her breath grows ragged.

“Stay with me.”

My hand squeezes hers, “My blood.”

We stand there staring at his door. Their curtains are drawn but I hear voices inside. I know she hears them too. We keep staring.

“We don’t have to do this if you’re not ready.” I feel the knife in my pocket.

“I’m ready.” Her voice is not her own.

“I…” she lets go of my hand as hers begin to shake. She murmurs something under her breath.

“What is it?” Her hands still. When she turns I don’t recognize the face that I see. A dead leaf echo of the person that once was. 

“I am the setting sun.”

My eyes widen.

“I am the setting sun.”

She pulls out the gun hidden in her jacket.

“I am the setting sun,” she repeats as she shoots the lock on the door and charges in. I trail her and am met with screams. The girl, his girl, is running away and I can hear her. My Carmen. My Carmen who would tell me stories and make me laugh, who would draw pictures on her walls and slept with a nightlight because she was afraid of the dark. My Carmen who is trailing his lover as she screams for him to call the police. I follow the trail of voices and watch as my Carmen pushes his lover down as she tries to crawl away. My Carmen crawls too, discarding the gun and reaching for her knife, using her nails in the meantime. Her hands come away with flesh and blood and his lover screams as the floor becomes tainted. My Carmen pulls at her hair and makes quick work of her back as her cries become drowned. The walls turn scarlet with the force of the veins in her throat. I can do nothing but watch.

Their bodies lay at the foot of their stairs and at the top, there is a shadow whose silhouette I’ve burned into my memory the way it was burned into hers. She looks up then, My Carmen, and for a moment she returns to herself.

“Nenna.”

He watches us from the top of the steps with his impossible eyes and break-neck mouth that smiled as he took all things beautiful from her when she was only a child.

“Nenna.” Her voice wavers.

“Nenna,” she repeats, gathering strength, the blood on her hands running up to reignite her ancient hatred that only the dead and the dying can possess. Her voice jerks him into action as he runs into a room but my Carmen is faster. She flies up the steps and I fly after her as she slams at the door and it opens without protest.

His fear causes him to stumble as he crawls on hands and knees like his dead love as he begins to cry.

“I tried.”

She advances on him as she begins to sob.

“I tried so hard.”

His moans hit the walls and come back to him and in the distance, I hear sirens. She’s on him now, gripping his hair and at that moment I know that she loved him, still loves him, and her eyes are alive, alive, alive.

“But you took everything, everything.”

I want to look away, can’t. I promised her that I wouldn’t.

Her knife lifts and it trembles in her hand as she screams at him, “I have nothing left.” and he begs for his life as she pulls at his skin and aims for his stomach, pulling it up and up and up as I hear a storm of footsteps flooding in from below. I watch as his life dims and I watch as she swallows his heart, his eyes, his vocal cords that would sing her to sleep when she’d beg.

Police arrive but I cannot leave, I must not, I dare not.

I owe it to her.

I owe it to her to see this to the end. 

So I kick and I scream as I watch with helpless eyes as she cradles him in her slender brown arms. 

I watch even as they begin to pull me away. 

I watch as one draws their gun as My Carmen looks at me for the last time.

“I am the setting sun.”