The Terrible Sun

And now, something for the winter months, something to remind me of just how awful summer can be, especially one that never ends.

Through the window of this awful room shines the red sun. Day and night, with long unbearable hours of pink and orange light, it shines. In the summer, when clouds should come and winds of thunderstorms should blow and scream and cry, and the dark tops of unspeakable trees whip and thrash, I wait by the window and watch the sun.
Motionless it is fixed now to one spot, nailed in place by the unthinking mind of man and science gone mad.

Glowering down from the heavens its relentless glare wears on while the earth around the remains of this old building I have found dries, and dies.
I sometimes wake in these last days from grasped hours of fitful sleep and think the night has come. But vision returns to burning eyes and I cry that I am once again wrong.
The sky shimmers and rolls weirdly in the distance behind red hills and the tall pale barren plateau. Dark shafts of light drunk and dead trees prick the hollows and seem to shiver under the damnable frozen light.

Would that I could find some cool dark cavern and rest a while inside against the wet darkness. A deep cave stirred deep beneath the screaming ground blind to the light, the light the light.

Long have I sat here, gazing out to the fallen city, the land littered with the glinting remains of man. Metal shapes, shards of glass winking the occasional human remains. I watch the light flow like motion against the flat surfaces, pressing at my once familiar, but now strangely silenced world.

I have slept, when I awaken I am again struggling against blindness, my eyes pasted shut and thick with dust and film. Against the back of eyelids rides a memory of a different world, one clothed in verdant greens and blues and the pearl white of clouds, and the little towns, speckle the hills and valleys and shine and collect in the soft shades and shadows of trees.
No more.
I often watched the approach of tall clouds, brooding dark and mysterious in their gray heights, and listened to the thrum and pulse of distant thunder washing over me, and sometimes I would go out and let the cold breath of winds shriek past and through me and cool me and chill me to shivering.
Now, I can only sleep and dream and waking, pry my sore eyes open to see again the sun that will not set, and will not sleep until all of man, and the remains of man, and the thoughts of man are burned and rubbed out of and off of the earth.

As the time passes, I have come to wonder that I might be the only one, the last one left, and that the sun is seeking me and pursuing me and killing me day by day. Which has no meaning now, there is no night, only day.

I had traveled for a long time, seeking the area of earth where the sun did not shine constantly and strangely down. I traveled and saw the dieing world and have come here, to these lonely remains to wait and watch.
I do not know how long I have been here, or how long now I have sat here defying the dry lingering ravages of the squat autumn colored sun. I had heard, before the end began, that because of a mistake, a mindless oversight, a result of hubris unchained, that the days and nights would now last for years. The earth’s turning, slowed to a painful crawl.
On our side, the sun planted firmly overhead and warred against us with hellish intensity, and baked and dried and burned every last moist molecule of life. I almost envied the ones frozen in the inky black darkness at the other side of the world. Years hence, when the bright desert of our side succumbs to the dark, there will be nothing left, and in the span of the new earth year, nature will accomplish what man could not do alone. Extinction.
I dream again, in fits of unnatural agony, of a tiny yellow house with green shutters and a brook bubbling near by, it’s gardens overflowing with soft fragrance. I dream of space and the black vault of night, blinking overhead filled with an enormous moon and coy little stars. I dream of love and family, and the voices of neighbors beyond the picket fence. And I dream of the evil and blighted moment when day became our fiery unrelenting god.

I will wait, wait here in this dusty rubble and see to the end of it all. I am sure of it now, I am the last one, the only human alive to watch and keep count and dream the old dreams and cry for us all, and pray that somewhere there is some benign being to come and spin this nightmare away.
there is no one left but the strange hard sun dominating the sky and I, insanely watching with tired dimming eyes, crying the shriek of despair and leaving nothing but a shadow..