Issue 10.1 Fall 2014

issue 10.1 cover image

 

 

Sun

 

Paige Spizzo

 


“You’re so lucky,” her mother would say. “When I was in school it was grey every day.
Like an old movie, you know?”

 

Sunrise, what’s that? Almost nobody remembered actually seeing one at the time. The
mornings were dreadful, she’d go on. Never a reason to wake up on time or get up early. In fact,
for a number of people there wasn’t a reason to wake up at all.

 

“Such a shame,” her mother had said, “Right dear?”

 

“Very,” said her father as he stirred his coffee.

 

And on that note she agreed fully with her parents; things had gotten considerably better
in her lifetime. For one thing there was now a distinct difference between night and day-that in
and of itself was something her grandparents considered a miracle. Had anyone walking down
the street looked upward at any point today there would actually be clouds moving around the
projected sky to form and disperse and reform into something else, just like real ones. Sure they
couldn’t actually provide shade, but that wasn’t really needed with the synthetic climate.

 

When her parents felt nostalgic they told her about how different things were when they
were growing up. Their favorite adjectives for these stories included the words solemn, dim,
dark, uneasy, and, in a case of her mother caught up in celebratory drinking one evening, fucking
terrible. As she had grown up just a few years shy of global lighting, the girl could not relate to
any of this. Her closest experience came from a morning jog taken sometime in high school that
would have been picturesque had the entire city not been lit by miles of street lights. Her
generation could only identify with their parents’ hardships when maintenance came around to
check the city’s system, which involved turning off their sun for a few hours. Literally.

 

The new sky’s all well and good, she said to her friends one day, but don’t you kind of
miss the real thing? They looked up at her from their spot in the library with their pens hovering
just above their tablets, and considered her question. One had turned her attention back to her
tablet and seemed to be googling something. Another glanced out the window at the rows of
white buildings; she frowned. After seconds of silence the two girls looked at her and answered.

 

“No.”

 

“Nope.”

 

“Don’t think I really remember it anyway.”

 

And that was that. The subject was dropped as the three returned to their studies. Well I
don’t blame them she said to herself. Different people, different strokes I guess. And while she
agrees to disagree, at the same time she wonders if they’ve ever experienced anything like what
she considers to be the best moment of her life:

 

On a noticeably windy day when her family still lived out in the southwest where the new
sky hadn’t reached yet, the grainy haze that covered the sky just so happened to be thin. As in,
thinner-than-it-had-been-in-nearly-thirty-years thin. A sweeping wind blew her hair in front of
her eyes as she looked upward and saw that the smoggy mix had been blown apart to reveal a
patch of pale blue sky. Along with this rare sight came a beam’s worth of natural light from
above. She remembers the exact moment it happened and how she stood dumbfounded in the
middle of her best friend’s back yard when this feeble ray of light that traveled millions of miles
through space from the fiery mass of a dying star they called the sun, and limped through the
thick atmosphere directly onto her face.

 

In this favorite moment she recalls the bigger details, like the faint trace of warmth that
emitted from this, ‘the real thing”, and the sudden brightness that wasn’t harsh enough for her to
cover her eyes or look away. She remembers the colors that filtered around the surrounding haze
and made a sort of glow around the opening. Had she been a more spiritual person, this may have
been her own grand revelation; it felt somewhere between a godsend and an epiphany. As it was,
what she never remembered years later was what she told her friend a few minutes later when
asked why she was crying on the patio furniture.

 

 

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