Hung the Sun

Sometimes I need it to be dark. That’s what I need. For it to be dark. I lean out my apartment window and pluck the midday sun like a plum from the sky. I hold it in my chapped palms, consider the swallow: the bob of my throat, the stone in my stomach, but no. I don’t think I would survive all that light spilling out of my body’s overworked seams.

So I reach for the glass of water left untouched, grown stale with air bubbles on my nightstand. I drop the sun inside like dentures, detritus, and watch the liquid eclipse its light. Watch the sun sizzle, give out.

I lie in bed. That’s all I do. I must lie in bed for a long while, although there’s no celestial body in the sky by which to mark the time.

This time, the one to knock on my door is the old man from the apartment below. When I last stole the moon, I was ambushed by the building’s teenagers, who demanded I hand it back because how would they sneak around after dark without its light? I adopted bravado, asked the leader–older than the rest, a college dropout like me–to give me a kiss in exchange. When she flashed a wicked smile and leaned close, I bolted, dropping the moon out of my pocket like a bouncing ball while her laughter echoed bright off the pitch-black courtyard.

Today, I can tell it’s the old man downstairs from the sound of his footsteps, the uneven gait. One of his feet is half a size smaller than the other. He has to wear special anatomical shoes. Claims in a previous life, he was a pirate king. Got his foot chewed on by a sea dragon.

“Hey, kid,” the old man from downstairs says through the flimsy door that separates the hallway from my one-room apartment. “Did you steal the sun again?”

At least he doesn’t call me girl. Even in the dark, I cannot always trick myself into believing no one in my life sees me that way.

“Did you know?” I speak from my spot over the blankets, too cold in the absence of the sun, but too tired to crawl between woolen warmth. “In nuclear winter, the only way to survive the frost is to find yourself a submarine and travel far underwater, close to the earth’s warmth. I read a science article about it and everything.”

What I don’t say is: I am far underwater.

There’s no warmth here.

Here be dragons, chewing on my bones.

Still, the old man seems to hear this because his gruff voice grows softer. “My daughter said she’d visit this afternoon. She’s only been to my apartment once, during our reconciliation. What if she doesn’t know the way in the dark?”

What if she gives up on me? is what the old man from downstairs doesn’t say.

What if, after everything I’ve done, I’m not worthy of being sought after in the dark?

Still, I hear his words. Yet part of me wants to keep the sun my captive. Because if its shine doesn’t benefit me, if I get enough vitamin D and a balanced diet and even salute the sun during yoga every day but I’m not better, never better–what right does anyone else have to its light?

“Hey, kid,” the old man says. “I was a pirate king in a past life. Maybe the sun really died then. For good, I mean. Maybe you and I hijacked a nuclear submarine and sailed underwater, looking for my daughter.”

I picture the undertow, the warm volcanic fissures spitting magma-hot bubbles. I wonder if we would find new things to salute with the sun gone for good. If, in that past life, I had someone—anyone—who would seek me at the end of the world, to the edge of the earth.

I get up in a single serpentine motion so as not to lose momentum. I grab the sun from its glass prison, water and effluvia of hydrogen and helium dripping between my fingers. Wrenching the door open, I face the old man downstairs, and he looks older and wearier than I remember, all spots and scars.

I shove the sun in his hand, curl the spindly fingers around it into a steadfast fist.

If he’s the one to hang the sun on the sky, maybe his daughter will forgive his vestigial tendencies–pirate king, deadbeat dad–that made him run away from her again and again.

I slam the door in his face, dive under my blankets. Through the weave of the wool, I see sunlight refracted by a filter of seawater, reflected over submarine portholes, dragon scales.