by M.K. Bailey
I’ve got the sun in a box and my parents say it’s about time I gave
it back but I’m not so sure. I like tanning in the privacy of my own
room. (I’m at that hyper-modest stage of puberty.) I look like I’ve
just come back from Florida and am never lonely anymore because
the sun keeps me company. I also collect balls and it’s an awesome
addition to my collection. There are problems of course. It’s always dark outside
unless I take the sun with me but this is next to impossible. Not
because the sun is too big—it’s the size of a basketball, about the
same size it was in the sky—but because it rolls and hops and
sputters and sets everything on fire. You’d think the sun would
float in the air but it doesn’t so I store it in an old metal coal bin
my dad hauled up from the basement. Mom complains about the
smell—like rotten eggs mixed with Clorox—but I’ve grown to
like it.
Last night, Dad gave me a deadline—tomorrow morning—
to put the sun back. I’ve locked myself (and the sun) in my room
until I figure out what to do. I didn’t even go down for breakfast.
Most parents would have taken the sun away and immediately
contacted the authorities, especially considering the chaos and
mayhem the sudden darkness has created. But my parents are both
therapists and understand the damage such parental interference
could do to my delicate psyche at such a critical moment in my
development. They’ve always encouraged me to make my own
decisions in my own time. But the sun is a hard thing to give up
once you’ve got it, like a lover I imagine, though I’ve never had
one of those, yet. The real problem is, I don’t know how to put it back.
It all started out as a joke. Exactly a week ago, I was walking
home from school with Shirley, who’s an even bigger dork than I
am, which is why I like her even though she’s a total bore. I make
up all these great stories and she just shoots them down—tells me why they could never happen. Anyway, I told her that I owned the
sun. (I liked to pretend it was part of my ball collection.) “Prove
it,” she said.
I couldn’t believe my luck when I saw, not six feet away,
a sprinkler watering someone’s lawn so I picked it up, aimed it
straight at her and commanded the sun not to dry her off. But
instead of running away like a normal person, she tried to yank the
sprinkler from my hands. We were wrestling for the thing when
the woman whose lawn it was yelled out her front door that she
was going to call the cops. We took off across the street, through a
kiddie playground and into the woods. We ran until we came to a
clearing that was there for no reason.
The trees just stopped, leaving a round grassy field with
a neat circle of stones at its center. “This is where I talk to the
sun,” I announced. Stalling for time, I took off my knapsack and
rummaged around until I found my math book (my least favorite
subject). I took it out, tossed into the stone circle and stomped
on until it was good and crumpled. “Look, Shirley.” I picked up
the book, held it high in the air like a torch then hopped around
inside the circle and howled a magical incantation: “Ooom bah ray.
Ooom ba do. Clam, clam, flim, flam. Orbit me anew.” Then I lit
the book on fire with my brother Danny’s lighter (that I carried
in my pocket at all times along with a Swiss Army knife) and
poof! there went math, up in flames. I threw the book into the
air, jumped clear of the stone circle but the book never came back
down. It floated up and up like a helium balloon until I lost it in
the glare of the sun. Shirley gasped, impressed at last. I gasped too.
We both stood there in silence, squinting at the sun and
waiting to see what would happen next.
“I’m drying off,” Shirley announced. But I didn’t care about that anymore because something
was happening. The sun seemed to be getting brighter and brighter
and the sky behind it darker and darker until there was this strange
whooshing sound then, blam! a flaming ball of fire crashed into the
circle of stones, flashed white—I thought I’d gone blind—then turned an ashy charcoal grey with an inner pulsing orange glow.
Shirley stood next to me, her body rigid, her mouth agape. The
woods loomed black around us and the sun was no longer in the sky.
“Wow!” I said.
“Wow!” Shirley said. “Can I have it?”
“No way,” I said. “It’s mine.” I stared at the thing and it
sputtered like a candle going out and for a minute I thought it was
dying. I picked up a nearby stick, poked it, and the ball hissed, spat
out purple blobs, then settled into a pale yellow purr. The grass
around it burned and gave off a thick sweet smoke. No way this
was still my math book. But it wasn’t hard to put two and two
together. The fact that it was the middle of what had been, until a
few seconds ago, a sunny day and the sky was now jet black, soupy
with ten times more stars than I’d ever seen in my entire life,
could mean only one thing—that the fiery orb at my feet was the
sun.
If Shirley hadn’t tried to claim it for herself, I never
would’ve thought of bringing it home. (She was jealous of my ball
collection.) But now I had to or else she’d do something dumb like
pour water on it from her giant water bottle and try to carry it
home in her knapsack.
“How’d you do that?” Shirley asked. “None of your beeswax,” I said. What had I done? I strug-
gled to remember my incantation but drew a blank except for the hokey phrase “orbit me anew.”
I could practically hear my mother yelling: you got
yourself into this mess so you can get yourself out, like the time I
tried to make playdough out of flour, bubble gum and finger paint.
It took me hours to clean up and you can still see faint blue and
green blotches in the wood countertop. I swore Shirley to secrecy
then we got busy. “Look for wire or metal,” I told her.
The grounded sun cast a flickering light deep into the
woods. I found an old metal milk crate at the edge of the clearing
and Shirley found a length of barbed wire. Using the mini-pliers
on my Swiss Army knife, I cut the wire in two and rigged up a sling. With Shirley’s help, I scooped the sun into the crate. Then,
careful not to stab ourselves on the rusty barbs, we carried the sun
suspended between us, taking short cuts and back alleys. An
unnecessary precaution, as it turned out. Nobody paid any attention
to us and our little fire. They were all frantically building their
own. Backyards glowed with bonfires, strange behavior considering
that it hadn’t cooled down yet and the electricity still worked.
Shirley begged to come home with me but I wouldn’t let
her. It was going to be hard enough to explain this to my parents
without her idiotic comments getting in the way. By the time I
dragged the sun up the driveway, my mother was in the middle
of a huge freak out. “Oh my God, Cindy. Oh my God,” she said
over and over. She didn’t even notice the sun burbling away in the
crate—it sounded like a pot of water boiling over. She just hugged
me until I thought I would pop. Then the hem of her dress caught
on fire.
“What? Oh my God! Jesus, Cindy.” I pushed her to the ground. “Roll around,” I yelled, then
ran for the hose that turned out to be unnecessary because the
fabric just sort of smoldered. But I didn’t notice this until after I
drenched her. Furious and sputtering, she yanked the hose away
from me and blasted the sun with water.
“No, you’ll kill it!” I tried to stop her but she’d suddenly
turned into this real-life action figure, her eyes fierce like daggers,
her hair a mass of writhing snakes. Even the muscles in her arms
bulged. With one push of her immaculately manicured hand, I was
on the ground. Clearly this was one mess she didn’t trust me to
clean up.
She sprayed and sprayed while I whimpered, “It’s the sun,
Mom.”
The ball hissed and smoked, glowed red hot like a briquette
then fizzled to a pale gray. Satisfied, Mom dropped the hose,
wiped the snakes out of her eyes and yanked me up by the arm.
“You’re grounded for a month. No TV, no candy, no friends, no
balls.” For a moment, she’d forgotten to care about how dark the
world had become. I didn’t take my eyes off the smoldering sun as Mom
hauled me up the porch steps. What if she’d killed it for real? But
then the sun spluttered, almost like a cough, and pulsed red. Small
flames sprung up all around.
“Look Mom, it’s like a daisy.”
She stopped, sat me down on the porch steps and glared at
me. But there was a flash of light, a small whoosh, and she turned
to see.
“It’s the sun,” I said. “I sort of found it on the way home
from school.”
She dropped my arm, finally. The white dents from her
razor-sharp nails looked like teeth marks from a wild animal. I
wished they’d never go away—they’d make a great story. Mom stared at the finger-high flames until they turned back into daisy-
petals, then she sat down next to me. The sun flickered and sighed while I told her the whole story. At first, just like Shirley, Mom
didn’t believe me. But when I got to the end, she put her arm
around me, soft and loose this time. “Well I’ll be damned,” she
said. It was a rare moment of mother-daughter bonding.
We sat there drying off until Dad’s car came crashing up
the driveway. Even though he had his headlights on, he narrowly
missed the basketball pole then went straight into the garden shed
which collapsed like a house of cards. (Dad had built it from a
kit—he never was much of a handyman.) Mom and I looked at
each other, rolled our eyes, then Dad leapt out of the car.
“This is it,” he yelled. “It’s over. We’re all going to die. How can you just sit there like two camp girls roasting marshmal-
lows? The world’s coming to an end!” He literally ran around in circles then collapsed on the macadam in a fetal position, sobbing.
It reminded me of the time one of his patients showed up in the
middle of the night screaming the same kind of stuff. The guy
practically busted in our front door before Dad got down there
and straightened him out.
Mom sighed, stood up, walked over to Dad, cooed
nauseating endearments then knelt down, wrapped her body around his and whispered things I’m glad I couldn’t hear. Dad
made a rapid recovery. I won’t go into all the boring details about
how he yelled at me, how he said he’d had just about enough of
my preposterous stories and that it was about time I grew up and
faced reality. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard such rigamarole
but never from my father.
For the next week, Dad spent a good part of each day in
my room staring at the sun. Mom made him wear sunglasses and
sun block. I’d cleared a space for the coal bin under the window
that I kept open for ventilation and cooling (it’s getting colder and
colder out). The top of the bin slants down so the sun is easy to see
when the lid is up, which it prefers. If I shut the lid for too long,
the sun starts to smolder. (No surprise that it’s claustrophobic.)
“Why does it keep burning?” Dad kept asking. He was sure
it was going to go out, that the world was ending. I sat next to
him on the bed and listened to him talk about why this was
happening—all sorts of gobbledygook about God and sin and
hell-in-a-handbasket—a side of him I’d never seen before. But it
was a real togetherness time for our family. All the schools closed,
businesses shut down and Danny even came home from college. It
was like Christmas but without the fuss.
Danny camped out in front of the TV even though only
one channel still worked—the Emergency Channel. He didn’t
believe that I had the sun in a box in my room but that was no
surprise—he had the imagination of a calculator. I watched for a while, all the scientists struggling to explain. Talk about cocka-
mamie theories. Nobody had a clue how simple the answer really was. I thought of calling Diane Sawyer and giving her the scoop.
I imagined her crew showing up, parking their trucks all over
our lawn. I’d get to wear make-up and insist she interview me in
my room so that my ball collection would be on national TV. I’ve
glued all but the biggest and heaviest ones to the walls. It’s like
living inside a gum ball machine.
But I never called. All hell would break loose if I did. The
CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the Pentagon and NASA would all show up—pumped-up guys with guns and scary-looking uniforms who
would cordon off the town, turn our house into a bunker and
destroy the sun for sure.
If the sun’s not back in the sky by tomorrow morning,
Dad’s going to call Artie, a physicist from the university, and ask
him to come over and take a look. Artie is a patient of Dad’s who
suffers from grand illusions. Dad thinks he’ll know what to do but
I know he won’t—that he’ll take the sun to his lab and bombard it
with photons or quarks or, worse yet, put it in an atom smasher if
they’ve got one.
So after everyone’s asleep, I pile on my winter clothes
(I look like an Arctic explorer—it’s that cold out), transfer the
sun back into the milk crate and sneak out of the house. I line the
trunk of Dad’s car with a conveniently pre-folded and flattened
metal wall from the garden shed. I work slowly, carefully. I’ve got
to be quiet because there’s no wind, no sounds of any kind really,
to cover up the racket I’m making. But I’m not too concerned.
One side effect of the darkness is that everyone sleeps a lot.
I don’t know how to drive but how hard can it be if my
brother can do it? I start the engine, put it in gear and lurch across
the lawn, through the pachysandra and over the azalea bushes
which are probably dead by now anyway. Shirley, dressed all in
black like a cartoon burglar, is standing at the corner like we’d agreed on the phone but I almost run her over because I have trou-
ble finding the brake pedal. I finally stop in the middle of the intersection and Shirley opens the door, plops down next to me and starts bouncing up and down like she’s got to go to the bath-
room. I hate to admit it but she could be important in making this work. Everything has to be like it was before. And who knows,
maybe she’s got some force, some hidden power that I have
heretofore been unaware of. Besides, I need help and I don’t want
anyone else to know about the circle of stones.
I drive the car across the playground and into the woods.
The branches scrape against the metal and it sounds horrible, like
a hundred of Mom’s fingernails scratching a blackboard. Finally there’s a bang then a loud hissing sound and the car lurches to a
stop.
We can’t open the doors so we crawl out the windows.
We take the sun out of the trunk, work our way single file toward
the clearing, and lo and behold, much to my relief, the stones are
still there. Without hesitation or pausing to catch my breath, I roll
the sun out of the crate into the circle. It is so beautiful, it still
takes my breath away. I know I will never see anything as beautiful
for the rest of my life. Like my dad, I never got tired of watching
the sun’s everchanging moods—its flame an endless succession
of colors and textures. Sometimes it didn’t flame at all but just
glowed. Temperamental, for sure, yet at its core, there’s a constancy,
an inner strength. I’m sure if it wanted to, if provoked, it could’ve
blown me and my whole family—the whole Earth for that matter
—into smithereens. I don’t know why it didn’t after the way
I’d boxed it up. Perhaps the other balls made it feel at home. Or
perhaps it had come down to check us out and decided that things
weren’t as bad as rumored and that we deserved to live. Whatever
the reason, I’m grateful.
When the sun is happy, as it is now, out of the box, the
flames shoot up in an intricate weaving dance. And it can sing.
Well, not sing but hum, like crickets at dusk. Even Shirley is quiet.
She’s stopped fidgeting and I almost like her.
I haven’t thought things through further than this. I wait
for a sign, or an impulse to come over me.
“You’ll never get it back,” Shirley says. “And we’ll all die
and it’ll be your fault. How does it feel to be the one who destroys
Earth? Worse than Hitler, I hope.”
“I’ve got it all figured out,” I say.
“I don’t believe you.”
Incensed, I stand up and command her to collect wood.
“We’re going to need a lot—big heavy pieces.”
The sun’s light seeps into the woods, highlighting the dead
branches littering the ground. I work hard so that Shirley has trouble
keeping up and looks like a wimp. After what seems like hours, we’ve got a pile the size of Dad’s car but I have no idea what to
do with it. I worry about the time (it’s hard to keep track of these
days), that Dad’ll wake up, find me gone, panic and call the cops.
Suddenly I see an image in my mind—the sun bouncing
up into the sky like a super ball. The image is so clear, it’s like an
answer but not a complete answer. The problem is, how do I get
the sun to bounce? Then I think of the way flames leap, and the
way they can shoot a rocket into space, so I decide to make giant
flames. I grab a long straight branch about as thick as a baseball
bat and nudge the sun off to one side of the circle. With Shirley’s
help, I pile the wood we collected in the middle of the circle, then,
with a long skinny twig touched to the sun, light the pile on fire.
The wood is dry and flames up quick. The sun sputters and spins
with delight like a toddler. I try to think of how to throw it onto
the fire. I imagine flinging it from the metal crate like a sling shot
with me on one side and Shirley on the other but it’s too risky.
Shirley’s the opposite of athletic and the sun would go flying into
the woods, set them on fire and all would be lost.
“So now what?” Shirley says in her whiny little voice. I’d
like to launch her into outer space. This gives me an idea.
“To save the world, one of us has to die,” I say.
“Well, I’ll miss you Cindy,” she says. “And I’ll write a book
to make sure that everybody knows what you’ve done.”
We get into this huge argument about how I can’t die
because I have to say the chants and I don’t know what they are
until I say them because they come to me from the center of the
universe.
“‘Ooom bah ray. Ooom ba do. Clam, clam, flim, flam.
Orbit me anew,’ didn’t come from the center of the universe,”
Shirley says. “The universe would never think up something that
dumb-sounding.”
Suddenly the bonfire flame doubles in height and we
scramble back. When I turn around the sun is gone. I panic that
it’s been sucked into the bottom of the bonfire then see it floating
over Shirley’s head. Sparks shower down onto her wool hat and
singe her frizzy hair. “Don’t move,” I command. And because she is in awe of
me, even though she pretends not to be, she doesn’t move. I grab
the long straight branch that I’d forgotten to put in the pile, swing
it through the air above Shirley’s head and whack the sun into the
fire. Babe Ruth would’ve been proud.
“Now run,” I shout. “And don’t look back.”
The heat is intense and the explosion sounds like an
enemy spaceship blowing up at the end of a Star Wars movie. The
whole sky glows a brilliant orange as if someone has just spilled a
giant bucket of paint on top of the earth. I turn around just in time
to see the wrinkles where the sun has embedded itself in the dome
of the sky. A second later the wrinkles are gone and the sun looks
the same as before except that now I can hear it humming. Its song
is more upbeat—like reggae—but is soon drowned out by the
singing of the birds.