I.
When I was a young girl, my husband’s father flew an air machine into the sun. Since then, the days have been dark, the nights bright.
That man who needed to reach the sun, Hiram Hightower, worked his whole life underground, mining, digging through the hard earth to make other men wealthy, to fill their homes with fine things, to clothe their wives with fine linen and silk, to feed their mouths with fine food. He worked the unyielding earth until his lungs blackened and his bones swelled from the pressure of the world bearing down on him day after day after day.
As a young man, Hiram did not mind spending most of his waking hours in the world beneath the world. “It was always a mystery,” he said when my husband was a young boy, “to sift the earth through my fingers, looking for the glint of precious metals.” As the years passed, though, there was less and less mystery. In the morning, he drank coffee from a tall thermos as he drove to the mine. He put on his coveralls and heavy jacket and took the elevator down into the mine. He clawed through clay and granite always searching for something precious. He shivered as the cold sank into his skin. Sometimes he’d find feldspars and hide them in his pockets. He’d take them home and buff them to a perfect shine for his wife, who kept them on the mantel above the fireplace. Those crystal formations were the only beautiful things he gave to his wife, other than their child, so she treasured them in the way of women who love hard men.
The air in the mine was terrible. After too long, a man couldn’t breathe down there. By the end of each day, as the miners rode the slow mile back to the surface, back to fresher, thicker air, they clutched their chests with trembling hands. Most nights when he got home, Hiram was silent, had nothing to say, knew his family would never understand that each time he went down below, he was forced to leave a piece of himself behind, knew that someday, there wouldn’t be enough of him left to come home. He ate the food his wife set before him—hearty fare, well-seasoned meats, freshly baked bread, vegetables from the garden she tended. His wife, Mara, always had a smile for Hiram, sat with him patiently, sat through his silence, pretended each night that she was not sharing her table and her bed with a lesser man than the one she had known the night before.
Hiram had lovely hands, Mara has told me many times. His hands could fill a woman with fear if she didn’t know better. You could see the strength of them in the thick web of skin and muscle and vein and bone. His whole body was a thick rope of muscle and sorrow. When they were alone, Mara liked to lie on his back, the broad, warm expanse of it. When she kneaded his body with her fingers, he groaned loudly, said, “Woman, you make me never want to leave your side.” Mara never feared Hiram, wasn’t worried about the size of him. He wasn’t gentle when he touched her but he was a good man. He touched her the way she wanted to be touched. She loved how he knew there was strength in her, too.
Something changed in Hiram when he turned forty. He had always been a quiet man, but on his birthday, he became silent. All he could think about each night was how, sooner than he could bear, he would have to go back down into the cold, thin air and the cramped tunnels and the dirt falling into his eyes and nose and mouth, choking him, breaking him. At night Mara stretched herself alongside her husband trying to coax a word from his lips but he could not give her the one thing she needed from him. She started to forget the sound of his voice. He still went to work, still clawed through the earth, still filled the rusty carts with the precious, shiny metals greedier men craved. There was no joy in it, though, none at all. It became harder and harder for him to stand tall or take a deep breath.
One morning, he woke up and realized he could not spend another minute, day, or hour in the dark, thin air of the world beneath the world. His wife shook his shoulder when the alarm sounded. The sun rose but Hiram did not get out of bed. He sat up, leaning against the iron headboard. He nodded toward their bedroom window, asked Mara to tear the curtains down. His request was strange but Mara was so grateful to hear her husband’s voice, she did as he asked. She grabbed the length of cloth and pulled the curtains to the floor with one fluid movement. Two jagged holes were left in the wood of the wall but neither Hiram nor Mara minded. Hiram patted the empty space next to him and Mara went to her husband. He looked right into the sun with his wife by his side. He didn’t look away even when his skin warmed uncomfortably. Later, after their boy went to school, Hiram pressed his lips to Mara’s bare shoulder and turned her over and followed the bony knots of her spine from the length of her neck down. He slid his strong, lovely hands along her thighs, smiling as they trembled against his touch. She rolled onto her back and when he pressed her body into hers, she sighed. She gave in to the weight of him. He held her face between his hands like he might crush her skull. The pressure of his hands made her head throb, almost pleasantly. When Hiram kissed Mara that morning, her lips swelled and bruised, threatened to split open and spill. Her lips felt pulpy against his, beautifully misshapen. The whole of her body felt that way by the time he was done, as if every muscle, every part of her skin, had been worked through his hands and his mouth and his eyes until it was broken all the way down.
When Mara climbed out of bed, sore, heavy, drained, Hiram said, “Don’t wash,” so she didn’t. She went to the kitchen and prepared him a sandwich with thick sliced meat and tomato, a glass of cold milk. She smelled him everywhere, felt him everywhere. When he was of a certain mind, the weight of him was inescapable. Mara loved that about her husband. Hiram joined her in the kitchen and ate slowly. He stared at her in a way that made Mara feel like she was sitting across from a stranger. He did not look away. She did not look away. She tried to ignore the soft ache in her chest that bloomed, slowly, into a nervousness she couldn’t quite make sense of. When Hiram finished, he stood and took his plate to the sink, washed it clean, dried it carefully, set it on the counter. He looked out the window above the sink, out into Mara’s garden, into the thicket of trees beyond. He squinted as he looked up, toward the sun.
“There’s something I must do,” he said.
Mara shook her head. “Don’t you break my heart, Hiram. Don’t you dare.”
He reached out and Mara slid her hand into his. Hiram led his wife outside and they stood on the slab of stone behind their house. He pointed up at the sun. “I want to touch it, just once. I need it, woman, I just do, and there’s nothing that’s going to stop me from trying to get there.”
That afternoon, Hiram drove to the nearest purveyor of air machines with a good portion of the money he had earned by making money for other men. The coins were heavy in the satchel he carried. The weight of them tired him but he had important business to attend to. He needed to fill the impossible emptiness inside him. Hiram listened as the salesman tried to sell him a fancy air machine with linen seats and slick lines but that’s not what he needed. He needed something strong, sturdy, an air machine that would carry him a long, long way. It was an ugly thing, the air machine he bought. There was no grace to it but he loved the color—a bright red that would make the sky pretty. As he walked around the fuselage, Hiram wondered how something so ungainly could take flight but the salesman assured him the air machine would serve him well. The salesman was a man of his word.
II.
I grew up in a valley flanked by two hills some called mountains. We weren’t much used to the sun anyway. That’s what we tell ourselves now that the sun has been gone so long. Our town was small but pretty, or at least, that’s how I always saw it. Pretty isn’t always about what you see. Sometimes pretty is what you feel. Minus the people, our town is still pretty to me. There were lots of trees towering over every house and building. As a child, I thought those trees reached straight into the heavens. I still do. I don’t much change once I set to feeling a certain way. The streets were and still are lined with wooden sidewalks, sturdy and rough-hewn, raised a few feet off the ground because most folks around here don’t trust the ground knowing what they know about what lies beneath, what that world beneath the world can take from you, has taken from all of us. The mine owners live near the center of town like they want their grand homes to be seen from everywhere, all steel and glass reaching toward the sky, almost as high as the trees, sprawled across wide stretches of land. In the shadow of those grand homes are where the rest of us live, some of us in the valley, others in the wooded hills, where the air is sweeter and the land is harder but means more. On the edge of the town are the mines, their entrances carved into the slow stone rise of the hills.
When the darkness came the world changed. It had to. Hiram Hightower flew his bright red air machine into the sun and the sun disappeared and the only light left was that of the moon. The only warmth to be found came from a good fire or a heavy sweater or the skin of another body pressed against yours. I was not yet a woman. I was a girl of eleven wearing a yellow dress. My hair was a long, crazy mess, reaching well past my shoulders. I was a crazy mess, too. I ran in our backyard, barefoot, my face streaked with dirt while my mother hung laundry to dry, wooden clothespins tucked between her lips. She hummed, the same song she always hummed, the first song she and my father ever danced to. She shuffled from side to side, her toes curling in the warm earth. It was a good day in a short life of good days.
We heard Hiram Hightower before we looked up and saw the sun grow brighter than we thought possible. It was a joyful noise, long and wide and full. Then that joyful noise disappeared and the sun grew smaller and smaller and smaller as it filled Hiram Hightower up with the light he craved for so many years working in the cold, lonely mines. When the sun disappeared, a bright red crease appeared in the sky. The air chilled and slowly the world grew cold, not unbearably so, but cold enough that we saw our breath more often than we did not. There was no more light of day. There never would be again.
In the early days of darkness, we thought it might end. We thought we might once again see the sun, feel its golden shine holding our skin. The bright red crease in the sky pulsed, and like the sun, that crease grew smaller and smaller until it disappeared. Scientists tried to make sense of what happened to the sun. It was nearly impossible for them to believe a man could be so full of darkness he needed to swallow all the light of the sun. The mines closed after that. The mine owners were not so greedy as to chance what another miner might do, what he might take from the world, to fill himself up. Their money could buy lots of fine things but it couldn’t bring back the sun. Only teenagers and scrappers looking for trouble, looking for a little something to line their pockets, go down in the mines now. They sell what they find on the black market, mostly in towns far away. No one in this town will have anything to do with that lucre.
It didn’t take long for the mayor to order gas lamps throughout the town, to provide enough light during the day for life to go on, perhaps a little warmth. That’s what I remember most from my childhood—the pale light of those lamps, and how during the day, the chilled air was thick with the sweet smell of burning gas, how even at night when the air grew colder, that sweet smell lingered, clung to our clothes and our hair and the skin of our fingers.
My husband was a year ahead of me in school and after his father flew his bright red air machine into the sun, no one would talk to that boy. Joshua Hightower wasn’t teased or taunted much. He was ignored. That was worse. Silence is the cruelest of cruelties. Each afternoon, his mother stood at the foot of the steps leading into and out of the brick building where we studied and when he ran to meet her, his hair wild and curly like mine, she took his hand and she held her head high and she nodded to him and he held his head high, too. She wrapped her arm around him like she could shield her boy from the anger and the darkness and the cold. They walked home alone, always alone. The only people who ever talked to Mara and Joshua Hightower in those days were the other miners Hiram worked with because they knew what could drive a man to swallow all the light in the world and because when Hiram flew his bright red air machine into the sun, for a moment they too felt filled up with warmth and light. They too felt whole. That moment, however brief and impossible to hold on to, for the men who knew only the world beneath the world, was enough.
My mother is a kind woman, always has been. My father often says she holds on to the kindness most people can’t or won’t be bothered with. When Hiram Hightower flew his air machine into the sun my mother said, “Bless his soul, may he always be filled with light.” When I told her about how Joshua Hightower didn’t have anyone to talk to at school, she frowned, her lips falling into a tight line. She put her hands on her hips and said, “We certainly cannot have that. You invite that boy home to play with you after school. You be a sweet soul to him.”
I wasn’t much popular, either. I was too smart and that made people uncomfortable—most folks where we’ve lived our whole lives don’t trust too much intelligence in a woman. There is also the problem of my eyes—they don’t hide anything. If I don’t care for a person, my eyes make it plain. I don’t care for most. Folks are generally comfortable with the small lies they tell each other. They don’t know what to do with someone like me, who mostly doesn’t bother with small lies.
The day after my mother told me to bring Joshua Hightower home, I studied him, in math class, from three rows back. I had always loved his hair and that day I looked at the shades of brown from dark to auburn, marveled at how those colors formed a lovely pattern along each thick curl. The back of his neck was tanned and slender, though not as tan as it once had been. Soon it would not be tan at all. We would all lose any brown in our skin. Joshua had a strong jaw, even then, and kind eyes. I was flushed with shame as I tried to make sense of why I had ignored him. My cheeks were still hot with my weakness when I sat next to him in the schoolyard, later that day. He sat, quietly, staring up into the dark sky, rubbing his hands together to keep them warm. He flinched as I sat down so I rested my hand on his thigh. I looked up, trying to see what it was he was seeing.
“My father is up there somewhere,” he said.
“I know.”
“He didn’t mean to do a bad thing.”
I nodded. “I know that, too.”
Joshua turned to look at me. “Why are you talking to me?”
For once, I decided to be comfortable with a small lie. “Because you look like someone I can talk to.”
The corners of his mouth tensed like he was fighting something. He shrugged.
“Would you like to come to my house after school?”
He bit his lower lip and looked like he was making the most difficult decision he had ever made. His forehead wrinkled. The longer he took, the angrier I got. Finally I shoved him and stalked off, filled with a different, angrier heat.
Joshua wasn’t at school the next day or the day after that. When I saw him again, he had a long, narrow box in his hand. He handed the box to me and looked to the ground.
“I’ve thought about it,” he said. “I would like to visit your home.”
“What if I don’t want you to come over anymore?”
He nodded toward the box. “That’s for you.”
I carefully lifted the lid. Inside was a long, silky pink ribbon sitting on a bed of red velvet. It was the most beautiful thing. I was afraid to touch that ribbon but I couldn’t resist. It was so soft, like nothing I ever felt. It made me feel perfect and beautiful. I closed the box and tucked it in my skirt pocket.
“We can walk home together,” I said.
I could feel the stares as we walked home, bundled in our wool coats. The gas lamps weren’t the same as the sun, but they did not hide us. We passed by the Hightower house and I noticed a new iron fence, real high, built all the way around the house. Hiram Hightower would hate to have his house closed in like that, I thought.
I pointed at the fence. “Why is your house caged in like that?”
Joshua shrugged. “My ma wanted to make it harder for people to get in our yard, throw things at the house. My dad made a lot of folks angry.”
I was quiet for a moment. “It doesn’t seem fair that you should have to live in a cage. It does not seem fair at all.”
He grabbed my arm at the elbow. I looked at his fingers, wrapped in thin leather gloves. He loosened his grip but didn’t let go. “It’s not fair,” Joshua said. “I hate it.”
“There’s no cage at my house,” I said.
After that, I wouldn’t say we were friends but we spent all our time together. We sat next to each other during class and shared our lunches beneath the skeleton of what once was a tree in the schoolyard. Each afternoon, we walked home beneath the flickering light of the gas lamps, tapping our feet against the wooden sidewalks, making music with our bodies. When people stared or whispered unkind things or when other kids at school tried to warn me off Joshua Hightower, I held my head high the way Joshua and his mother always did. We mostly went to my house, though once in a while, we went to his. Joshua’s mother was quiet, her hair always combed into a neat bun. She mostly sat in the front room of their house, staring up into the sky like she was waiting for Hiram Hightower to come back to her. Whenever she looked at me, her eyes were pale blue and watery like a slow-dying body of water. She stared right through me. She made me sad. She made everyone who saw her sad because we could see that the hole Hiram Hightower couldn’t fill inside himself found a new body in which to grow.
The kids we went to school with hated Joshua because their parents hated Joshua’s father and none of those kids knew how to be any better than the people who brought them into the world. When Joshua walked to the front of the classroom, they hissed. The ones who thought they were clever called him a Son of a Sun Stealer. He kept on holding his head high, always, just like his mother, because he came from good people worth minding. Joshua never turned in to himself or tried to make himself smaller. Instead, he grew and grew and grew. He studied hard. He watched over me and smiled every time I wore my beautiful pink ribbon, which was often. He told me he didn’t mind the silence of others so long as I was there to fill it. The older I got, the closer we became, the more I wanted to fill everything hollow inside him.
When Joshua was sixteen and I was fifteen, a council was convened to consider ways to bring back the sun. The members called themselves the Corona, mostly wealthy men, the kind who had created the emptiness in Hiram Hightower in the first place. They made it seem like they wanted to bring back the sun for everyone, so we could bathe in it and stare into it until our eyes burned, so we could remember natural warmth, but such was not the case. Most of us guessed the Corona were mostly interested in finding a way to reopen the mines, to make themselves even more wealthy. It was a dark, ugly thing to see such greed cloaked in false good.
Joshua and his mother were brought before the Corona to answer for Hiram Hightower’s crime, which was not a crime. I sat in the gallery with my parents. Every so often, leaning against the wooden railing in front of me, Joshua looked up at me. I held my hand open and he held his hand over his heart. The Corona suggested that perhaps someone from the Hightower bloodline should be sacrificed: if not Joshua, then his firstborn child. Mara Hightower, normally serene and composed, paled. When she spoke, her voice was strong, colored with fury. She said no more Hightower blood would be spilled in service of the sun. She said the spilling of blood could not possibly force the sun to rise. Many people in the gallery started shouting angry slurs. It terrified me to look at them, their faces drawn tightly into hateful masks, their lips shiny with spittle, their hands clawing forward like they wanted to tear Joshua and Mara Hightower apart, pull their skin from their bones, right then and there. The thought of them touching Joshua made my heart seize and twist itself into a bitter knot. That was when I understood love. While the gallery raged, my parents and I sat in a circle of miners who stood, quietly, pointing up as if there were no roof above them.
None of us knew what their gesture meant.
We did know no Hightower blood would be spilled as long as they drew breath.
By the time we matriculated at secondary school, Joshua was tall enough to fill any doorway, just like his father. He was bone and beating blood, organs and sinewy muscle. His hair was as wild and curly as ever. I was not tall but I grew into myself. I became beautiful—this is what I am told. I am not so vain as to claim beauty for myself. Joshua never told me I was beautiful but he didn’t need to. I could see what he saw in me by how he looked at me, how he looked into me, how he touched me, how he wanted me, openly, hungrily.
As the years passed we became the closest of friends and then we became something more. Joshua made me laugh and I made him laugh, too. We talked and talked and talked. We ran together, dark mile after dark mile, our legs growing strong and lean, to stay warm, to sweat even though our damp skin quickly chilled into a thin layer of ice when we stopped to catch our breath. We remembered the sun, the shine of it, how on a clear day, especially out on the lake, it was like the gods themselves were breathing into us. In the days of darkness, something different was breathing into us, something less kind.
The Corona continued to try to salvage the sun. They sent fire into the sky using a massive trebuchet but the higher that fire rose into the sky, the faster it burned out. They tried to capture light with lunar panels and then somehow convert that lunar energy into solar energy that could then be flung into the sky. The more ambitious members of the Corona suggested sending air machines to other planets, finding ways to steal the suns or moons or stars from other systems, willing to create a terrible imbalance in another world to set ours right. There were, eventually, sacrifices of Hightowers from other lands, but those slayings never accomplished anything more than filling the earth with more innocent blood. Splinter councils formed—each group more rabid than the next, more hell-bent on bringing back the sun, more obsessed with the cold and the darkness, choosing to see ruin where a different kind of life was possible.
Mara Hightower and her only child chose to live that different kind of life. They did their best to be good citizens. Mara volunteered all her time to those who needed any help at all, tried to find some kind of redemption where, though she was faultless, there could be none. She never knew the touch of another man, no one would have her, not even the miners who felt a certain kindness toward her.
When Mara and Joshua were summoned before the various councils, they appeared willingly. At one such appearance, Joshua, weary from the weight of his father’s burden, offered his life to the Corona, held his wrist forward, the blade of a knife piercing the thick green edge of a vein. As the Corona watched, he began to draw his blade along that vein, a thin line of blood beading in the blade’s wake. The council chamber was terrible and silent and still. I could not stay silent. I stood. I shouted, “Don’t you do this!” The chief councillor glared up at me, said I had no right to speak in the chamber, said I had been warned. I was not speaking to him. “Stop this,” I said, quieter now. One by one, the miners in the gallery stood and looked down at the members of the Corona until the chief councillor raised his hand. Joshua stopped, his blood slowly falling to the floor in bright red drops. Few people understood why the Corona spared Joshua, but I was in the gallery that day, surrounded by the silent, standing miners. I saw how the faces of the Corona darkened, how they tried to fold their bodies together to shield themselves from such quiet anger. It was plain to see they were terrified of what else they could lose to another man who was pushed too far, who got a wild need in him to do something that could not be undone.
Many nights, after his mother fell asleep alone, her eyes wet, Joshua would steal over to my house. We sat on the sloping roof and stared at the moon, which, in the absence of the sun, swelled into a fragile beauty from which it was difficult to look away. We often saw people in the houses on either side of us doing the same thing, sitting on their roofs, their faces beaming upward. It was so very nice to see moonlight, and how we could see beneath its glow the memories of who we used to be. Somehow, staring at the moon made the days less dark, less cold.
III.
My husband asked me to marry him in the observatory where we worked. Night after night, we pored over ancient astronomical texts, hoping that if we studied the stars, if we understood their long, unfathomable history, we might find a way to bring back the sun. We used powerful telescopes and long-abandoned instruments from the past to stare into the sky, to find some slow-burning memory of the sun. Even though our days and nights were dark and cold, I felt bright and warm everywhere. Joshua was my sun. I was his.
The night Joshua made his claim on me, I was staring at the moon, my eye pressed to the telescope. I marveled at how it made the heavens seem so near. The moon cast a blue glow over everything. I smelled Joshua as he neared, clean, so clean. He slid his arm around my waist and I covered his hand with mine, traced his knuckles. My heart pounded and there was a stirring between my thighs. I moaned softly. I wanted him as I always do, hungered for him deep inside me, my desire trying to claw its way out. Joshua pressed his lips against the back of my neck and I shivered, pulled away from the telescope and swiveled around in my seat, spread my thighs and pulled him against me, squeezed my thighs against his as I pulled his hand down my body, lower, lower.
I grabbed his chin, pulling him closer so I could look into his eyes. “Why are your hands shaking? You have certainly put your hands upon me before.”
His cheeks reddened and he looked down, to the side. I pressed my lips to his throat. His pulse throbbed against me, the artery thick and hot, the power of his sun. Joshua reached into his pocket and pulled out a dark gray box similar to the one he had given me twelve years earlier, narrower, thicker. His hands trembled harder. I held his wrists and pulled him closer. When he tried to speak, he only stuttered, his words twisting themselves into complicated knots.
I slid out of my seat and rested my cheek against his chest, hard and soft at the same time. The beating of his heart was so fast and loud it terrified me but I knew I could trust his heart. “Shhh,” I said. I took the box from him and set it on my chair. I stood on the tips of my toes, brushing my lips against his ear before grabbing the fleshy lobe between my teeth. He tasted like sweet spice. Joshua’s hands found the small of my back like they always do, locking against the base of my spine. We stood like that for a long while, his breath falling against the top of my head, my breath falling against his chest. The beating of his heart slowed.
“What do you mean to say to me, Joshua Hightower?”
He inhaled deeply, like he was trying to pull all the air in the domed room into his body. “I mean to marry you.”
“Are you going to be good to me?”
His brow furrowed as he nodded. “How could you ask that?”
I traced his lower lip with my thumb. “Promise me you won’t do something that would take you away from me or that would change the world as we know it now.”
Joshua fell slackly against me. I gasped but held the weight of him. We are both strong. “I am not my father,” he finally said. “My father was a good man. I aim to be better.”
“I’m glad you knew the question didn’t need asking. I mean to marry you, too.”
Joshua reached behind me and opened the box. He held my hand as if my bones were the most delicate things. He slid a beautiful ring onto my finger, the platinum of it cool and solid, an anchor, the diamond bright like the moon and what once was the sun. I had no idea where he got it from but I knew not to ask. Men need their secrets.
We fell to our knees. I slid my hands beneath his shirt, heavy cotton, my palms against muscle sharply carved, the bones of his rib cage. I pulled his shirt over his head and he did the same with mine. I stretched out on the floor of the observatory and he pressed a button. The dome slowly creaked open and I stared past the blue shadow of his body over mine, up into the stars, up into that bright, bright light of night. I dug my fingernails into the tightly stretched skin across his back as he filled me and moved over and through me and meshed his lips with mine. We crushed our teeth together. We were loud and wet and sloppy. I held Joshua deep inside but I never stopped looking at the stars. The pleasure took me all the way over. I cried. He licked my tears with the flat of his tongue. I said, “It is always you.”
Soon after that night, the councils started to disband. Obsession lasts only if it can feed. Most people, still angry, still cold, still lonely for the sun, stopped caring as much about turning themselves inside out for something impossible. Enough blood had been spilled, and there were few Hightowers left. It is easy to become accustomed to darkness and chill. If you bear it long enough, you can become accustomed to almost anything. Embrace the cold and dark—that’s what we did. We learned to love the different kind of light at night, the pale blue of it. In the moonlight, the world felt purer. Making peace with the world and its black days was the only way to find any kind of happiness. What we all wanted even more than the sun was a little peace to hold in our hands and hearts.
My husband and I married on the lawn outside the observatory, in the middle of the night. My parents and his mother and a preacher stood with us. I wore the pink ribbon, mostly worn to a thin shine, braided through my hair and a long white dress, no sleeves, a dress that swirled around my legs when I walked. Joshua wore his best suit, a fine cut with clean lines. We exchanged promises that were long ago made, however unspoken, and have always been kept.
IV.
There was a new life between us. I felt that tiny, unknowable creature stirring in my womb from the beginning.
I told Joshua while soaking in the bathtub, the morning after a long night of work, the water still scorching hot. Bathing was one of the few things that made my skin remember the sun. I was red and tender and soft. My husband stood in the bathroom doorway, filling the frame from side to side, nearly from floor to ceiling. He smiled, said something that made my cheeks burn, my thighs tense. When he smiles at me, I am all lit up inside, like I am standing in the whitest heat. I remember what it felt like, when I was a girl, to lie out in the sum, feel that holy warmth on my skin. I cocked my head to the side and dragged my hand across the surface of the water. It rippled in light waves. Joshua shivered, stepped out of his worn shoes, and then his clothes, setting them in a neat pile in the hall. As he sank into the water across from me he sighed, smiled again, and I felt hotter still. I tapped my toe against his chin and he pressed his cheek, then his lips, against the wrinkled bottom of my foot. My hair clung to my face as steam rose around us. We stared at each other for a long while. I never tire of looking into his face.
“You are too quiet,” he finally said.
I curled my finger, beckoning him closer. Joshua slid through the water, some of it splashing onto the tiled floor. He floated in front of me, his forehead near my chin as he looked up, eagerly. I cupped his chin, squeezing. I breathed deeply. There was a strange tightness in my chest, like my body was trying to hold on to my secret a little longer.
Joshua nuzzled my neck. “Talk to me. What do you mean to say?”
“We have made us a child,” I said, softly.
He knelt, spilling more water out of the tub. He is a quiet man, but on that night, there was no limit to his expressions of joy. I felt freer and lighter once I forced the words out of my mouth. We talked of how we would love our child, how we already loved our child. We laughed and laughed, our voices rising through the small room. When we emerged from the cooling water, my husband wrapped me in a soft towel and carried me to our bed. We made love. We were not gentle but we were gentle. He fell asleep inside me. The next morning, I woke feeling his eyes on me. He tucked his hand beneath my breasts and said, “We must keep this between us for as long as we can.” We grew even closer, even stronger because we shared this perfect, desperate secret.
My husband and I tried to hide the growing swell of my belly as long as we could. We kept to ourselves more than ever. The townspeople would not welcome a single moment of happiness from anyone sharing the blood of Hiram Hightower. Though the councils had mostly disbanded, fringe elements lingered. When a crazy notion gets in a man’s head, there’s not much that will disabuse him of it. Joshua’s father taught us that. We learned the lesson well.
When we walked in town, in the dark of day, it was difficult to contain the sharp line of joy binding us even more tightly together. No darkness could hide that. Joshua held me close, his fingers gripping my arm tightly. If a man or woman looked at me too long, with unkind eyes, Joshua bared his teeth. We held our heads high. We took strong steps. We kept our secret until one afternoon, while we were laughing and practically skipping along the wooden sidewalks the way we did when we were children, a man we did not know, a man sitting in front of Kershbaum Mercantile & Dry Goods, stretched his leg out in front of me. “Son of a sun stealer,” he hissed. He ought to have been ashamed of himself, a grown man speaking a child’s taunt. I didn’t see the petty cruelty coming. I fell hard, could feel where bruises would form on my knees and thighs, elsewhere. As I fell, I stared at Joshua with wide-open eyes, reached for him, but even though we tried our fingers never quite met. I thought, My baby, my baby, my baby, but everything happened too fast for me to think clearly beyond the terrible understanding of what we might lose. I hit the ground, slick with frost, and held my arms over my stomach. Everything ached and it hurt to breathe and there was a tight cramping between my thighs. I tried to stand but fell again, this time hitting my head. The world blurred.
Joshua’s rage, the rage he carried quietly for so many years, the rage of losing his father and the disappearance of the sun and standing before the Corona as he offered up his blood, the rage of living the whole of his life in a place where everyone blamed him for the darkness, that rage split wide open and spilled into the frost-lined street, and through the cracks in the wooden planks below us. Joshua reached up and grabbed a long, clear icicle hanging from an eave. He lunged at that petty man, holding the tip of the icicle against the man’s neck. I called my husband’s name and he stopped. He threw the icicle to the ground, where it splintered into a hundred pieces. If there had been sun, there would have been hundreds of tiny prisms of light. His hands shaking, red and probably numb, Joshua grabbed that man from where he sat, that man’s lips curling into an ugly smile. Joshua lifted that small, unfortunate man high into the air and shook him like he was trying to make the man into someone better. “She’s pregnant!” my husband shouted. “How dare you?” The man paled, looked real sickly as he tried to withstand the forceful heat of Joshua’s rage. I tried to focus, stretched my arm, pressing my fingers against Joshua’s ankle. “We need you,” I said so quietly I worried he wouldn’t hear me. Joshua released his grip on the man, who ran away, stumbling from side to side, leaving the sharp stench of urine in his wake.
My husband lifted me into his arms and ran three blocks to the infirmary. I hid my face in his chest, shivering. I said, “I am so cold.” I said, “Don’t let anything happen to me.” Joshua kicked the infirmary door open and placed me gently on an examination table. He covered me with thick blankets. He held my hands. The ache settled deeper into my bones. I went limp as the doctor pulled a bright light over my body. I was so drowsy. I sank into a sleep that wasn’t really sleep.
Sometime later, nearly two days, I opened my eyes to a room with white walls and a long window and beyond that a dark afternoon sky. I closed my eyes again, sighed, holding my hands against my belly. I smiled and remembered a lovely walk with my husband before a hard fall to the merciless ground. I thought, Finally, this is the price we pay. I sat up, stiffly. The deep bone ache returned. I rolled onto my side, slowly, and saw Joshua, his large body sprawled in a tiny chair or a chair that seemed tiny beneath his bulky frame. I reached for him, brushing my fingertips across his knee. He shot up and stepped closer to me, pushing my hair away from my face. He cupped my cheeks and kissed my forehead and my nose and my forehead and my nose. He smiled and I saw he had locked his rage back inside him and that maybe his rage was taking up less room in his chest now that some of it had been let out. When I tried to speak, he pressed a finger to my lips. “You’re fine. Our child is fine,” he said. I blinked, was falling asleep again now that I knew our private, joyful world would not end. I slid over a bit and touched the empty space next to me. I listened as Joshua stepped out of his shoes and climbed into the bed with me. He covered my hand with his. We held our baby together.
As we left the infirmary, passersby stared but no one dared approach us or speak an unkind word into the air surrounding us. Their rage made the air colder, thinner. After the sun disappeared, everyone harbored some kind of rage. It couldn’t be helped. The truth of it was that Joshua and I felt real sorrow for what everyone lost but after so many years, we no longer had the strength to carry it with us. We left the infirmary and picked up fresh bread, some fruit, and wine and then we went home, to our little piece of the world where we were safe, where our child was safe, where happiness was safe. The sun wasn’t ever coming back. There was no sacrifice, no blood to be spilled that would make right what Hiram Hightower had undone. If the price for the rising of the sun was the blood of our child, we would continue to learn to celebrate the darkness.
V.
Our daughter was born in the brightest space of the night, early in the new year. We named her Dawn. Upon hearing of her birth, for we were watched, the Corona convened, but because she was a girl, they decreed she would be spared.
They had no say in the matter, none at all.
The morning after Dawn was born, we sat with her on the deck Joshua built. In the farthest corner of the sky, we could see a light spread of gray where once there had been nothing but the black memory of the sun. The air was a little warmer. It was strange. Joshua stood and held our child up to this gray glow and even though we doubted she could understand us, we told her about days when the sun burned so bright it darkened our skin and covered the world in light.
We always knew we would not hide our child from the world. Such joy could not be contained. On lazy afternoons, we drove into town and walked beneath the flickering gaslights, inhaling their sweet, sweet smell. We reveled in the darkness covering us, holding on to the carriage handle tightly, smiling easily as Dawn spoke to us in the intimate language we tried so hard to understand.
When Dawn turned nine months old, she and I stood on the edge of what was once a lake but in the absence of the sun became a lesser body of water. The light spread of gray had brightened into a pale white. We could walk outside without coats or sweaters, some days. No one, not anywhere, dared to speak of the black memory of sun that had become something brighter. That day at the lake, Joshua walked along the dusty shore, his arms out at his sides, grinning, doing a silly dance. Dawn and I waved to him and sang to him. Farther along the shore, there were other families, enjoying the cool, clear day. I kissed the baby’s forehead and whispered the secret words of mothers into the soft skin of her face.
A woman walked up to me, not much older than I, a woman who had, like me, known the warmth of the sun as a young girl. She was thin and pale and seemed unfamiliar with joy. I held Dawn more tightly. My child cooed and I smiled wider. This woman looked at me and my happy child and my happy husband, who stopped his silly dance and made his way toward us with a careful look in his eye.
The woman looked up into the dark sky that was not as dark as it once was.
She pointed at my daughter with a long, skinny finger. “Was your child’s life worth a lifetime of darkness?”
I understood her anger, which was not so much anger as it was sorrow. I wanted to tell her what we did not dare speak, that what was once the sun might once again become the sun. I wanted to tell her the sky lightened the day my perfect child was born and that with time, the world would be bright again. I studied this woman and considered what penance I might offer her as we stood in the cool absence of light. Instead of speaking, I remained silent. Words cannot fill the faithless with faith.
I looked into my daughter’s eyes.
There is nothing brighter.