Ethan Fleisher

A Lonesome Sun’s Descent to Ascend

He was tired of all.

He was tired of all, but he was not tired of her.

Over the hills he could see the summertime. It was elite and in bloom, marauding shades of green and blue that took his breath away every time he gazed upon it. He would stand in awe and wonder about that land. He would watch the sun come up and it was not the sun he knew but something so much better; it was alive, it was more alive than the world he knew in all of it’s entirety. He would watch it rise and fall down over the hills and then land in a horizon that glowed incandescent and fiery. All there was inside him was her grace and this land. He would wonder about that land.

He wondered about her a lot.

His world was different. He would fall back from his hilltop perch and look out over the other side and wonder what had gone wrong, what cataclysmic scene had rendered this diseased, empty and desolate world. What had stepped down from the heavens and smitten the spirit, hope and soul from these lands.

Mornings he would sit below a spruce that he liked, the only thing in his being that he found to have substance. He sat below its branches and felt warm but he knew it was not real warmth for the sun he lived beneath did not give of its heat. He looked up and saw it rise, a gray and white orb blotched by fallen angels. He would gaze beyond his tree to the nothing before him. It snowed incessantly, the white amongst gray, the gray amongst black and the black amongst the colors that he gave no name to. There was no use in it.

Then he would stand, and stretch his arms and legs and roll his shoulders about until he felt there was meat on his bones. The great and lonesome Evergreens stood still and erect.

Gods once played here. They once danced and sang until one day there was a change, and the world lost its meaning and it died. The devils left to warmer climates, for this place no longer housed any good to corrupt. The only thing that came to him was snow upon snow, and a quiet and stillness he wished would fade like the color from his sun.

By the afternoon, the deadened and paling saucer above him in the western sky, he would set out about his journey to the hills.

The snow he trudged through was not wet. Nothing was. It was dry as ash and flaked away and blew in winds that were not there.

He would walk for hours alone.

Then he would stand and look below to the colors he missed, the blues and greens and magentas and violets and beauty he couldn’t even describe. He never saw her there but he knew somehow that she was there.

So he would sit down in the ash and snow and just watch.

One day he told himself something.

He sat there on top of the hill and he said, I might as well.

And that was all he said but he left his perch and he began his descent down the hills and into the place in which he had never ventured.

At first things were simple, they were not at all what he had thought. He slipped down barefooted over the dry and crumbling boulders. The hills were steep on this side. He wasn’t sure if he had made them this way, or what he done but the angle in which he climbed seemed nearly a straight drop.

And yet the climb was simple and he dropped from ledge to ledge with ease.

He scaled the hillside for what seemed like an hour and then he was standing alongside a creek that he had probably dreamed up under the Spruce, deep within his own sorrow as he was all of the time unless he was watching the land across the hills.

Well, he said. And he put his hands on his hips and stepped about its shores and stared into the blackened waters, thick as oil. Well.

Well.

Beyond the creek he could see more gray and desolation, charred and hollow ground like ancient fires had drank it dry and left it in hellish silence. My God, he said to himself. It was nothing like the land he had known; he knew of nothing and this was definitely something. It was hurt and it was pain and suffer.

Well, He said one last time and then he put his legs into the waters and he felt something.

His breath caught in his throat. The waters were icy cold, and his chest tried to suck in breath but his lungs were paralyzed. It took a few seconds for him to move and then his arms began to flail, and he sunk deeper in to swim. When his upper body became submerged, his diaphragm seized completely and he struggled and fought.

The slick black cold swallowed him, engulfed him. He coughed and sputtered and strained to keep his head above the surface. He kept his eyes on the shore, which was within arms length if he could just move the damn things.

Help me, he choked but he knew that no one could hear him. His biceps stretched and ached, and his shoulders seemed to break off at the joint, rusty and stiff. He pushed them forward and moved one leg at a time.

The pain within him was unbearable. His lungs spasmed, contracted. Help me, he called again.

Then finally his blue and gray fingers raked the shoreline and he sunk them deep into the ash and dirt and pulled.

He drug his heavy and broken body ashore and there he laid gasping until night fall came.

Then he stood on shaky legs and tried desperately to climb over the bones that littered the grounds before him.

He forced himself over the skulls and kicked away from the hard, sharp vertebrae. His hands tore and began to bleed as he crawled. Once he put his right hand down, and felt something hot and wet. He pulled it back his stomach retched. Strings of sinew dangled sticky and slick from his palm. He looked out across the mass grave and saw that the bones still had tissue clinging to their gray and burnt surface.

Oh God, he whispered and he wasn’t sure if he could go any further.

But alas he pressed on and he tried not to look upon them. Bloody eyes lay within the sockets of the skulls and they watched him as he went. Carcasses missing only heads and arms rolled awkwardly when he tried to walk across them, and he could still hear the terrible beating of the hearts inside.

When he came to the end of the dead, his front was covered slick with blood, but he was across and it did not matter what came before.

He looked up to the sky and saw that the sun was rising and he laid there and dreamt.

He awoke and saw that there was only one thing remaining, and that was the gods that had plowed the fields from his world and harvested the grass and foliage.

He went through them and did not look at their eyes. He just kept his head down. He could hear them whisper and talk about him, what he had done with the place, but it didn’t matter. She was closer to him now than she ever had been.

And then he was there.

The colors about him glowed with life like nothing he had remembered from the days beneath the real sun. The sky was blue, a blue that seemed to house just as much soul and spirit as he did. He smiled, smiled like he hadn’t in ages.

She came to him as he sat beneath a waterfall. Her blue eyes, her wet lips and her beauty exceeding all beauty.

I waited, she said smiling.

I know, he said. It’s scary out there.

You should have come sooner.

He nodded. I watched everyday.

Me too.

And she sat down beside him and they held hands. Then they stood and walked among the clover and the daisies, talked nothing of gray but all of God’s colors.

Somewhere over the hills there is summertime and beyond it is only a sun that shines alive with all the grace of a world anew.