Chasing the Sun

The sun refuses to be captured.

My hands work feverishly with the stubs that’s all that’s left of my pencil to try and create the image of dawn rising in this godforsaken town, the one beautiful scene left in the bullet-riddled, barren land.

Gray tries to sketch the scene: a simple road, full of potholes and cracks yet still functioning come the morning, leading to the rising sun. Shadows linger on the street, shadows of the weary buildings, here, that old coffee shop, there, the florist’s flower-less abode, and down the street, the skeleton of City Hall next to the last remaining corpse of a streetlight and then the lonely cars scattered about, and even that rusty bike there that used to be little Michael’s—

Debris, all of it. All of them.

My lead breaks, again. The nub of the pencil is barely half my pinky again--I’ll have to try and scavenge for a new one soon.

The paper is stubbornly lifeless.

New strategy. I take out my small pack of pencils, looking at the vibrant colors.

“Black, red, yellow, orange, green, blue,” I mutter, counting them off. There’s one missing: violet. Fat chance of ever finding it again. I select the red one and try to fill in my half finished outline (oh look, there’s where the lead broke) of the sun.

Decent. Orange next then yellow then a smidgen of blue and green and—

“I didn’t know you drew.” I hear and then I see him: little Michael’s little brother. He’s woken early. He plops down next to me, peering at my notepad. I suppress the urge to bat him away. It’s the morning. Violence, big and small, will come later.

“I didn’t think I still did either,” I reply, tucking my pencils away.

“No, don’t do that! I want to see!” he says, dark blue eyes—poor Michael’s eyes—pleading at me.

I unroll my pencils and get back to work. The child is surprisingly quiet, watching me racing to find the sun. I expect to reach that same block that’s been haunting me for weeks--but no, my pencils fly across the paper. A familiar joy rises up in me and for a moment, life is beautiful and I am as young as the child next to me again.

It falls. My hands stutter and stop.

“Keep going, please,” he says. “I wish I could draw like you.”

The pencils fall to the ground. I make no move to pick them up.

He scrambles to. “Here,” he says, holding them out to me. “Please draw more!” Upon seeing me making no movement to take the pencils again, he says, “Please, Miss.”

I look at him, really look at him. He’s young and far more exuberant than any of the rest of us have the capability of being but still. The violence echoes on his face in the little details: the shadows under his eyes, the scar on his lip, the scrapes on his knuckles…

The knife--his brother’s knife--at his belt, blood stained.

When I was his age, none of this had even started yet.

I look at my drawing. It’s the dawn shining over the half-drawn street. There’s something poetic in that. “No, I don’t think I can finish this today,” His face falls, and for a second I see the rest of us, we weary men and women, fighting for our deaths, in him.

“I could show you my old drawings,” I say to make that expression leave his face. “Here, see?” I say, turning the pages back in time to a warm summer night in the forest.

“May I see?” he asks, gesturing for the notebook. I hand it over and he is lost in a time before him, in my summer night that I snuck out without a care in the world with my brand new sketchpad and my old pencils and a roll of duct tape to seal the leaky canoe because I wanted the scene from the middle of the lake with the forest surrounding me, not from the banks.

“It’s beautiful,” he says. “Where was this?”

I laugh--a dark, bitter thing. He’s not old enough to remember. “The dried up lake. It was my favorite place as a child.”

“Oh.” He flips the page. “And this?”

“The view from my bedroom when I was confined in there after my midnight excursion for canoeing alone at night.” The room is significantly darker than most of my memories of it. I was not happy to be stuck but now, what I would give to be back there again…

“This?” I peer at the picture. It’s the first I ever did of a person in that notebook. It’s a quick sketch, just a few rough pencil lines to give the outline of her form and scowl. I can remember it bright as day and for a moment, I see my mother ranting at me in the graphite.

“My mother,” I say after looking away. He stays silent, flipping through the various pages until he reaches the one of this very street, bright and happy as it was and he pushes it back into my hands.

“My brother liked to draw,” he said. I close my eyes. That, I know.

Sighing, I pick up the notebook, carefully turning the pages until I reach the one I know he needs to see.

He takes it back immediately, looking lost in the face of the scrawl, so familiar, written in a violent tint.

“Matthew asked me if he could draw a bit. Before.” His brother remains silent, and I am struck with the thought that I should have showed this to him three weeks ago.

But I am not that person who selflessly relinquishes memories of the dead. Not even a crudely drawn picture of a bike that reminds me of our failure each morning I sit out here, copying the sunrise and the shadows of the dead.

“What ink is this?”

A smile cracks onto my face. “It’s his blueberry’s, from that morning. He didn’t want to waste my pencils and used a stick and the juice instead.”

I pretend not to hear the sniffle. “He always loved that damn bike. It didn’t even work! Why would he—why didn’t you—”

He cuts off and silence falls between us, broken by intermittent sniffles.

I could comfort him. I could walk away. I could be like the rest of them and tell him to stop mourning the dead.

“Do you want to draw? Here.” I flip my sketchbook to the back of the dawn piece and offer the sketchbook to him. He reaches down to where I set down my pencils and picks the blue and then he’s scribbling, his hand moving with neither skill or caution; harsh blue lines forming to make no object recognizable to me.

“What are you drawing?” I ask.

“A memory.” His hand continues to move, and still I don’t understand. “I’ve never been able to draw, not like you and not like—Matthew. Words are what come to me but you offered me a colored pencil and a sketchpad so here’s--my drawing, my letter to my brother. Scribbles only we could understand.”

“And what is that?” I say, looking down at the scribbles to try to discern something. It remains stubbornly opaque to me.

“Right there. See?” he says, pointing to the center of the piece. It’s a blob of scribbles. “My little dog. It’s sleeping there, see? It always was sleeping or being obnoxious. We had him ever since I could remember until we had to get rid of him. Matthew cried for days--he’d known him ever since he was a puppy. I always thought it was somewhat of a pest.”

And suddenly, I can see this vaguely in the scribbles. The dog is angular and gaunt with sharp lines encompassing all his figures. It’s a dog that wasn’t liked. Everything else remains incomprehensible to me. I shake my head and flip the page back to my drawing of the sun.

“Hey, kid--go back inside. It’s almost light out now.” He jerks, looking at the sunrise. The sky is almost just the regular blue-gray now. Standing, he offers his hand out to me.

“I’ll be in in a second.”

He takes a look at me, his eyes (their eyes) judging my statement. Glancing at my notebook and pencils, he says, “Don’t--just come inside soon, please.”

I nod and he takes his leave. The street is empty again, except for me. It won’t be for long and by then, I should get out of here. It’s an endless cycle, one I could do without.

Sighing, I look down at my paper. My fingers move, almost of their own accord, to my black pencil and begin to outline, again and again, the creaky old bike casting a shadow until I see the picture and find at last, the scene I wanted.

It’s my own little letter to dear Matthew.