Please Wait While He Kills You With The Sun
by Eli Dupree

I'm sitting curled up in the corner of his office. Across the room, a shaft of sunlight shoots down through a small window onto a paper on the corner of his desk. If the sun had its way, the paper would char.
My knees pressed against my chest, my hair draped over them the way it draped over her shoulders the night before. I idly start braiding bits of it.
I've never been able to tan. I burn. The sun wants to burn everything. I can forgive her for not knowing what I meant when I said I could feel the sun watching me, waiting, even in the night when all that mattered was the feel of our hands running over each other's bodies...
The sun will burn us until we flee into our man-made buildings, and then it will blast at the roofs until they crumble. It will burn the crops from the fields and let those who hide in deep caves die a long slow death of starvation. The sun will kill us all and no one will remember why. The sun doesn't care.
She'd said to me, "I never met a girl like you before." I told her to remember that night always, whether she was burnt, whether she was trapped under stone, we'd had this much and there was nothing and no one that could take it away from us.
I realize that I've been waiting the better part of an hour, and my fingers have worked my hair into a thousand little braided snakes. They writhe and coil about my shoulders, ready to protect me.
And now he comes through the doorway. He's dragging her at his arm, and I can read in his eyes that he made her tell him everything. Her eyes are red from crying as she stumbles in after him. I can read in his eyes what he's done to her. I hope she can ever be happy again.
He makes her sit next to me and  he walks behind his desk. The sun strikes at his eyes through his window and he curses, not understanding why he can be harmed. Then he sits and begins to speak. 
The thousand snakes all hiss and whisper to me, "Don't listen to him." I say quietly to her, "Don't listen to him." She only cries more fiercely. There is no roof between her and the blazing sun he carries in his words.
As he burns away any chance for us to live the way we did before, I seethe at his cowardice. He should take a stand, he should kill us there, in that pristine office. He never will.
If we die now, it won't be his fault, or anyone's. It'll be everyone's fault. It'll be the sun's fault.

~(November 2008)