Why Sunsets?

The light reflects off of the tin roof as Maria runs wool through the wires. She looks up and stares into the distant day, humming a tiny tune to herself. The song is bittersweet, and ripples through her body, causing her to twitch and shake with melancholy nostalgia:

If you find it’s me you're missing, if you’re hoping I’ll return.
To your thoughts I’ll soon be list’ning, and in the road I’ll stop and turn.
Then the wind will set me racing, as my journey nears its end.
And the path I’ll be retracing, when I’m homeward bound again.

“When are you coming back from the war?” The words sound foreign to her, and it seems that she didn’t say them, but someone else, someone else inside of her, clawing their way out, quietly whistled them from her stomach.

Joe walks through the front door and onto the porch in his army uniform, carrying a gun and gunnysack; the left half of his face is missing. He approaches Maria, who is in her rocker, still separating wool. “What are you doing,” he asks, glaring down with his one eye.

“I’m making a sweater for Eugene; I’m almost done! It’s got letters on it and everything. When he gets back I’m going to have him wear it.” She pauses, then idly asks, “When is he coming back?”

“Oh,” Joe says, the words stumbling out of his mouth, “You’ll see him soon.”

“I told him to be careful. I said, ‘Don’t you let yourself get hurt out there Eugene, don’t you do it. It isn’t cowardly to run from a fight, so long as you can come home to me afterwards.’ That’s what I told him, an’ he listened, so now I’ll get to see him soon.”

Joe sighs, and sits down in the chair next to Maria. She looks at him as though he is normal, as though she could not see that only his right side remained. Joe glances over at the table next to Maria’s rocker, and says, “I think you took a pill or two more than you were supposed to…”

She ignores this, and instead gazes back up at the sky; the sun is sinking into the ground, and over her shoulder the moon is springing up. Joe pauses, then quietly asks, “So, why sunsets?”

“What,” she says in a daze. She doesn’t know why, but it’s becoming difficult for her to talk, and even more so to stay alert. “Oh… I don’t know. Because, because the sun is so beautiful, and when it goes down… It’s as if, as if everything beautiful must die. You get this feeling, like something precious has left you forever, and you don’t know how to handle it. It’s enough to make you forget that the sun rises again, and the beauty comes back… Eugene and I used to watch them almost every night… Oh, I do hope the war ends soon. You know I’m due with his baby?”

“I don’t know much about him,” Joe says, turning away, “only that he and I… well, the bomb got my left,” he points to the missing half of his head, “and Eugene, uh, the bomb got his right…”

But Maria’s lost her focus. Although her hands begin to shudder violently, she finishes the sweater and holds it up to her. Joe starts talking again, scratching his charred flesh with a partially-melted finger. “God, ’43 was so long ago. What year is it now, ‘06?”

“Yes. Eugene has been gone for a long time. But Janice, who lives down the street,” she says, pointing to a long-decimated house in the distance, “she said it’s gonna be over soon, World War II. Then Eugene will…” Her voice trails off into a series on incoherent mumbles, and for a reason unknown to her, she can no longer speak. Joe picks the empty pill bottle off the table and reads the label:

Number: 867340921

Angeles, Maria.

To prevent break-outs in Psychosis and Dementia,

Patient is instructed to take one tablet daily.

“Wow, how many did you take,” Joe asks curiously as he starts to fade from sight; his question goes unanswered. Maria is no longer blinking, but jerking uncontrollably, tears running from her slowly dimming eyes. As she spasms, a word spits from her mouth: Eugene. Finally, she lay still.

Darkness cakes the atmosphere in a swirl of black and blue, and the moon shines malevolently. Although the sun has set, as it inevitably must, it will rise once more, and then a new day will be born. And the sweater Maria knitted during her sunset contained two words stitched neatly in the center:

Welcome Home.