Acquainted With the Night

A/N: This short story, written for the second Poetry-Inspired Contest, is based off of Robert Frost's poem of the same title. Enjoy!

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Everything hurts. Everything except black. So I’ll rise only when the sun is dead. I’ll rise only when the earth is black and cold.

As ironic as it seems, I miss the sweet amber glow of sunlight. On the dreariest winters it would come to me like an angel of hope, brushing the blue snow with the back of its hand and making it orange. When it fell upon my face it melted the flecks of frost on my nose and cheeks.

On the three mile trek back from the coal mines, our charcoal-dusted shovels and frost-bitten buckets clanged against one another like chains and handcuffs. We were too tired to muffle them, and the Germans, noticing the symbolism with a cruel and bitter happiness, never tried to quiet us. But whenever the sun arrested the sky with its trembling might and glorious colors and set the snowy clouds on fire, I straightened my back. I smiled. I held the bucket apart from the shovel and ignored the unimportant flames that raged in my muscles.

For, as the sun taught me, life is beautiful.

Things are different now, of course. But during those years leading up to my seventeenth year, the sun was my greatest joy; during an allotted time in Auschwitz, it was my only joy.

Gradually, the Nazis noticed how much I loved it. They amused themselves by calling me Sonnejunge, Sun Boy. They started to circle me with tall guards and placed other workers around me so that the shadows always followed me in my work. In a short time, I became pale and frozen and miserable.

Seeing that it was perfectly hopeless, I stopped trying to reach the sun. But whenever a stray ray of sunshine would happen to strike me, the Nazis would rip out their batons and beat me, usually right on the spot where that blessed sunlight had momentarily rested, until I collapsed. I’d lay there, silently cursing the snow and the Nazis.

I wished for warmer days, far, far away from Auschwitz. Maybe in a salt-kissed bungalow, where I could watch the seagulls bicker in the sand.

Meanwhile, “Catch the Sun on the Sun Boy” became the hit game of the winter. They only kept me alive so that they could have something fun to do. They only hurt me enough so that I could still get up the next day and play their game.

One night, sore, shivering, and dressed only in my filthy set of blue and white striped clothes, I pulled back my left sleeve and tried to scratch the six ugly numbers, 395031, off of my arm. Part of my delirious reasoning was that if I ever got my own bungalow on the beach, I wouldn’t want to be reminded of camp life every time I checked my watch. The other part was that I hated the number 39. That was the year the war started and the year I said goodbye to my home in Austria. What wonderful luck that those very numbers would be cruelly tattooed on my arm for as long as I had skin on my bones.

That night I scratched like a madman and didn’t stop until a fellow prisoner calmed me down, the straw mattress sticky and already stained with blood.

Hell, I should have known better.

The next morning a Nazi saw the blood on my arm and struck me down. He rattled off orders to the other guards, and within an instant they had me on my knees and praying for mercy. My hands were locked behind my back so that I couldn’t move.

“Sonnejunge,” the Nazi sneered, his German drawl scraping harshly on each syllable. “What did you think you were doing? Did you think we’d forget who you were if you took off your identification?” He spat on my face. “Ungeziefer. We can’t forget the Sun Boy.”

His eyes were as frostbitten as coal-bucket metal. I would have liked to swallow, but with a knife at my throat I didn’t dare. Saliva pooled in my mouth but left my tongue as dry as paper.

He gestured to my arm. “Is this what happens to you, when you are without your precious sun?”

One of the guards behind me said something in German that I didn’t understand. The Nazi that held the knife paused and looked up. He was thinking. Then a smile twitched at the corners of his lips.

“I wonder, what would a Sun Boy be if the sun became his greatest enemy?”

At that, I swallowed, and my Adam’s apple scraped against the blade. I squeezed my eyes shut as a tiny trickle of blood snaked down my neck.

“Don’t close your eyes, Sonnejunge. Look at the sun. Look at it while it’s still your friend.” He grabbed a tuft of my hair and swung my head to the side so that I could see it.

It was, indeed, the last time I saw the sun as beautiful, the soft copper glow that broke through the fence a sign of hope and not a demon of misery and pain that drove into my skull like a hundred thousand needles. For that moment, the snow that fell and broke the stream of light in bits and pieces was as soft and sweet as feathers.

When he finally tipped my forehead back, I thought he was going to carve my eyes out, but what he really did to me was much, much worse.

~*~

Twenty years later, I go to sleep when the sun rises and wake when the sun falls. I live in the darkest corner of the darkest city, on the saddest, poorest lane there is.

The sun is the enemy. It has done nothing but bring me pain. Nighttime, on the other hand, will alight upon my room like a faithful friend. It will bring me serenity, solitude, and safety. It will cover me gently with a warm woolen coat before gracefully escorting me outside, down the street with the fewest streetlamps. If there is a storm outside, it matters not. I will still my feet at curious sounds, and climb earthen staircases to heavenly heights to touch the misty clouds. Darkness and a trusty pair of goggles will keep me safe.

The moment the Nazis tied me to the bars of the fence, leaving nothing between my eyes and the devious rays of light, I did not wish for a bungalow on the shore. I wished for the clock-faced moon as my friend and the stars as my orange-tipped snow. I wished for soft rain and gentle shadows.

If I’ve learned just one thing from this unsettling life of mine, it’s that eyelids deserve more credit than they are due.