The Sun's Poison

The girl can’t remember the last time she saw the sunlight. She can’t even remember if sunlight is actually real or if it’s a figment of her imagination that she’s held on to, to comfort herself.

She can’t remember why she ended up curled in a ball in the dark and sticky cellar. The girl has been held captive for so long she doesn’t even fully believe life exists outside of the four walls she’s confined to.

The one thing the girl with no name is sure of is that something is very wrong. She knows that there is a man who comes into her room. A man who always wears something over his face and mouth, his voice low like a dull blade being dragged across wet stone. Every time he speaks she flinches as if she’s being physically hit.

The girl has grown used to his presence because he always brings things for her to consume. Food and water that leaves a sour and vile taste in her mouth. He never leaves her alone until she drinks every last sip of a murky liquid. The girl is used to finishing her drink fast so he’ll open the door and walk off into another room that looks identical to her own. Sometimes though, he’ll reach down and drag his calloused hands all over the jutting bones on her bruised and pale body. She knows that if he’s in this mood the only thing for her to do is close her eyes and imagine what the sunlight might look like.

Her visions started out bold. The sun consisted of vivid and bright colors. She would imagine something shimmery, a cool liquid that would glide over your skin, leaving you clean and new. Now, when she tries to conjure up those brilliant colors, there’s nothing there. She’s sure she saw the colors there before, but now they’re simply… gone.

All of this is to say that the girl knows something is wrong because the man hasn’t shown up. She has no concept of time, but she has been left without his odious presence for almost a week. She’s survived off a small bucket of water the man had left in her room. To her dismay, the water seemed to be disappearing faster than she could ingest it, and the heat slowly continued to rise. While the girl was stuck in perpetual captivity, the world was decaying. A deadly heatwave wiped out society.

The power outages came first. Car tires started melting, water supplies evaporated, and people fell dead from burns and sun poisoning. Deep underground with no source of light anywhere nearby the girl has managed to live through the worst of the damage. That won’t matter for long with her lack of water and cramping stomach from starvation.

She stares at the door from her spot on the ground. She knows that from her corner to the door it’s only three steps. She knows this because every time he walks out, she tries to escape. It never moves for her like it does for him.

She stares at it. She tries to find the energy to cry out, to stand up. But she can’t do it.

Her nausea builds, but some small place in her mind knows if she throws up again, she’ll die. She has nothing left inside of her. She shifts her mind to something else. She feels disgustingly wet. Her hands close around the back of her neck, trying to unstick her hair. Her fingers get stuck on the metal chain around her neck. It’s connected to a heart-shaped locket. It’s something from her life before. Something from the place she can’t remember. She despises it with everything inside her, yet every time she fumbles with the clasp she can’t get it undone. She pulls on it. The chain digs into her hands, her neck, it refuses to give. Its presence is as insistent as her very own heart is to keep beating. It clatters against her collarbone in a mock pattern of the heart that beats inside of her chest.

Get up. She can’t do it.

The silence pulses around her like a living being. It feels deeper, more cavernous. It lulls and breaks. She’s sure she can fall asleep to it.

Yet that's when far above her a wind pushes the door to the staircase open. That’s when the wind pushes the stagnant heat of the upstairs room down. The silence is in the middle of its repeating interval and when it comes sinking the heat follows.

She hisses at the warmth, the sudden influx of heat motivation enough for her to sit up. The room looks no different when she studies it. The door is still closed.

Three steps.

She takes them.

The metal scalds her hands, yet she still pulls. Nothing. A scream of rage and agony that has been building inside of her for years escapes and chills the air around her. She leans into the door, ready to accept her defeat. The door gives and pushes open into further darkness.

She waits for the man to yell at her, to punish her, and drag her back to her death sentence, but she hears nothing. She takes a tentative step out of the room, then another, and another. Each step causes her body to quiver with exhaustion.

The heat is unrelenting like the man’s breath when it heaves onto her skin during his moments of contact with her.

She reaches the stairs. She manages to take one step up, and her muscles tingle with a fiery pain of unuse. She pauses to look at the foreign light at the top. She climbs another stair.

The girl ascends the steps unaware of the doom that awaits her at the top.

When she reaches the blown open door she’s ready to collapse. Her chest rises and falls with each ragged breath and her skin bleeds sweat.

The first thing she notices about freedom is the smell. It’s rotten and unlike anything she has encountered before. She has to close her eyes, the light too much of a shock to her unadjusted retinas. When she braves opening them, she sees an overexposed outline of the man. Her abuser. She steps closer to him. His skin is red, blotchy, and peeling; well on its way to decomposing. She takes another step, he doesn’t move, his chest doesn’t rise.

To her right, there is light pouring through a window. She walks to it like it’s the only thing that will save her. Her hand brushes glass and she pauses. Did she come all this way only to be trapped in another room?

She runs through her list of things she knows again. She knows the door downstairs didn’t move when she pulled, she had to push. So she pushes her whole body into the glass. It doesn’t budge. She steps back, and her eyes fall on a chair. With a trembling body, she picks it up and throws it and herself into the glass. It shatters in a display of violent, colorful shards. Colors that fill the missing spot in her memory. She lets out a gasp. She found sunlight. It’s real.

She pushes through the broken glass, laughing as it cuts into her skin and red pours of her in little droplets. She stares at her wounds in amazement. Color.

It gets hotter when she climbs out the window, but she doesn’t care. She sees grass and lets out a delirious laugh as she falls to her knees. It’s the softest thing she can ever remember touching. She vaguely recalls that lawns should be green, but she doesn’t care that she’s kneeling in a patch of brittle grass.

She looks up at the sun. It coats her sickly white skin in dry heat. It’s nothing like she imagined, but she takes it in with wonder. It’s all so beautiful and bright, horribly bright.

She glances down and away from the light. Her eyes catch on the locket which is sparkling from the sunlight. Her heart swells. The locket was never a grim reminder that she was still alive it's… she notices a collection of scratches on the front.

Dawn.

The word is unfamiliar to her, but it still nags at a small corner of her brain. She’s heard it spoken before. Dawn. It’s her name.

There are no other sounds around her, no other life to witness this groundbreaking moment with her. There is no one to warn her to go inside, to try and live through this. To join the few others who are fighting for survival. No, all she has is this moment. This moment of complete and utter bliss.

Right now it’s just her, the grass, and the sun. Her, the grass, the sun, and freedom. It’s magnificent. She curls into a ball on the grass, letting the sun coax her into her long-awaited sleep. She dreams of all the ways she and the sun can dance in this new life.