Sunshine

So I basically wrote this straight through, and it hasn't been edited. If it makes absolutely no sense, then that's probably why. Enjoy :)

She wants it again at times—the burning blindness of staring straight into the sun.

When she was much younger, she and her little brother would see who could look at the sun for the longest without blinking. She always won, and even after her brother had been sitting on the grass rubbing his watering eyes for several minutes, she’d keep her burning gaze fixed on the sun.

Could it take me away, she wondered, pull me up like a rag doll on a string?

She imagined it for a moment: her limbs going limp, her head lolling back like a newborn’s, being inexorably dragged upwards in a golden beam of sunlight. Would it be liquid or solid? Perhaps it would be soft and warm. What if it was cold—could sunlight really be cold on the inside, if you cut to the very center of it?

You’ll ruin your eyes, her mother told her. Stop looking at the sun. Come inside and sew like a lady.

And yet she stayed outside, waiting for the sun to take her away.

She doesn’t notice at first; it happens slowly, in pieces. Her porcelain skin is marred by angry splashes of red; her freckles darken and stretch in ever-growing clusters; her blue eyes are frosted silvery white. She is falling apart, they murmur, the sun is taking her away. Some days she is too tired to get up, and her room is dark and silent. Some days she wakes up early and walks to the creek, dangling her feet in the cold water and staring into the sun with eyes wide open, because it’s the only way she can seem to see anything anymore. She imagines the sunshine filling her body, imagines herself glowing golden with it.

She is falling apart, it is true; but the pain of staring straight into infinity is too beautiful to surrender.

When they come for her, it isn’t a surprise. They take her gently by the hand while she is sitting by the creek, and she follows them blindly into a car with soft leather seats. The crisp white linen suit of the person sitting next to her scratches at her bare leg; she tugs at her skirt, wondering absently whether she had worn the blue or the yellow today. She looks down, but it’s impossible to tell; the skirt melts into the suit melts into the blurry black leather upholstery. Her feet are bare, she realizes, but perhaps they will give her shoes at the end of the journey.

The car stops smoothly and they get out. They walk inside a building. The floor is cool beneath her feet—marble? Perhaps it’s just linoleum. It’s not as if it matters.

“It’s the Moore girl.”

“Right, bring her back here. She’s in 110.”

The room is cool and dry; she gently drags a fingertip across the walls, and finds them slick and frigid. This cold white room is the antithesis of sunlight, of her golden infinity; then she remembers—could sunlight be cold inside, if you cut to the very center of it?

At the center of infinity, then, perhaps there is simply nothing.