Color of the Sun

The water that holds me aloft is warm and soft, cradling me in its arms. It rocks me back and forth to comfort me, it swallows up my tears and hushes gently. Above, everything is blank and gray, the same color as the water. There is no horizon line. The sky and water fade into each other unceasingly. Maybe there is no difference between them, and I am suspended in the middle of the ocean.   

When I move my fingers, the water feels thick beneath them. I’ve been here a long time now. Streaks of color swim across the gray above me, or drift through the gray below. A splash of green drips to where the horizon should be, and then the water laps it up. When my fingers stretch towards it, I can’t quite reach. My hands are shaky.  

There is no sun. That’s why there’s no horizon line; there should be a sun there. I think one day it dipped down into the water and sunk to the bottom. It’s waiting there, warm rays lighting my back, tangling in my hair.   

I feel empty inside. This is all there is or ever will be. Water. Sky. Me. Nothing.   

The water rocks me. It whispers to me, in the waves that roll across me, in the streaks of pink and yellow that seep into my skin. The colors remind me of something. I feel goosebumps on the back of my neck, and my mind shudders, resists my attempts at searching further.  

Sunset. Pink and yellow on the horizon line. It calls to me, it tethers me to my unhappiness. I’m still forgetting something important. The world didn’t always look like this. I’ve seen the sun, I know it should be there. I raise a hand and stroke the yellowness. I won’t forget again, I promise.  

 

“Over there! Look.”  

“You think it’s another body?”  

I can’t move. I’m holding hands with the water, a deep purple. My eyes are clouded with it.  

“Move closer.”  

“She looks dead.”  

“Maybe not. She still has some color left.”  

I feel the water begin to stir. It’s getting colder, the purple is fading. I try to grab it, to hold it close, but it darts away from my grasp. I think, don’t leave me to the gray, to the nothingness, but my mouth can’t make the words.  

Something touches my hand. It’s hard and scratchy, not the softness of my ocean or the gentleness of my sky. I turn my head. It’s brown and sharp edged and familiar, but wrong somehow. There’s only the sea, the sky, and me. That’s it. That’s all there is.   

“Can you hear me?” The voice is harsh and grating compared to the water’s whisper. It’s so cold. I want to sink away from this, to be enveloped by the sun’s warmth all the way at the bottom of the sea where I belong.  

There’s a tightness around my arm. I yank it away, but I am not strong enough to resist. This is wrong. This isn’t supposed to happen.  

“Help me grab her.”  

Another tight grip pulls me away from my water. This is wrong. I turn my head to look away.   

The water clings to me as I’m pulled from it. My arm is cold and wet and lifeless, and it feels wrong, and then my head is pulled out too, and my hair sticks to the back of my neck in thick ropes, and I shiver, and I’m not floating anymore, my legs thrash underneath me to keep me from falling into nothingness, everything is blurry and fast and cold and wrong this is wrong this is wrong thisiswrong thisiswrongthisiswrongthisiswrongthi  

The last of the water kisses me goodbye with a streak of purple. I liked that one the best. I don’t know if I start crying then, or if I have always been crying.   

With a thud, I land on something solid.  

Now I realize my body is waking up. I didn’t know I’d been sleeping until now. It hurts, but I think that’s good.   

“Are you okay?”  

I don’t know if I’m okay.   

I open my mouth, and the words form on my salty lips before I understand them. “Thank you.”  

 

The boat glides over the still water. I stare down at it, my head in my hands. It’s been gray for a while. 

“What’s your name?” one of them asks. Her eyes are dark and red, a color I haven’t seen yet. She’s sitting in the middle of the boat, but hates paddling, and stabs her oar into the water as if she’s trying to kill it.  

I shrug.  

“You don’t remember anything?” asks another. His eyes are green, the sky’s favorite. He’s also in the middle, but rows much more cooperatively, like it’s easy. Like he’s been doing it forever.  

“No.” I hope they don’t expect me to row. I wouldn’t know how, and I don’t want to have to sit next to someone. I like my spot in the back.  

“Your ship must have wrecked pretty bad,” says the third, authoritative with eyes a yellow I know I’ve seen before. “We found a lot of bodies in the water.”  

I don’t remember a ship, but it doesn’t matter. “What happened to the sun?”   

The three of them stare at me.  

I sit up. “It’s the brightest thing you’ve ever seen, and at night it sinks down to the edge between the sky and water and disappears.”  

Yellow considers this thoughtfully. I think she’s the captain. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”  

“Oh.” I know I’ve seen it before. I know it’s real, or it was, and it’s just somewhere else now.   

“I’ve heard of people like you,” Red says. “People who come from nowhere with tales of another world that isn’t just water.”  

A small puddle stirs at the bottom of the boat, cold against my bare feet. I curl my toes.   

“There are others?”  

“I don’t know. Maybe. Doesn’t matter, you’re here now, and there’s no way out except the way your shipmates went.” Red gestures to the water.  

“They didn’t suffer,” Green offers sympathetically. “And some people say that you don’t really die, you get born somewhere else. Maybe you’ll meet them again, and there’ll be a sun there. Two, even.”  

I smile gratefully.   

 

Our boat is small, but it’s enough. I’m no longer drifting in an empty gray ocean. I’m no longer alone. Red tells stories and makes people laugh. When we swap seats and I row, Green lets me rest my head on his shoulder. Yellow steers and tells us where to go and yells when we don’t row fast enough. Sometimes the ocean whispers to me, but I’ve stopped listening to it. We are on top, we are alive, and we have somewhere to go.  

 

I’m staring at the horizon line. It bothers me less these days. I disregard it and close my eyes, feeling the cool spray of water against my eyelids, the wind in my hair, the rocking of the boat. I do not need an answer. This is enough.   

When I open my eyes, something isn’t right. I turn to my friends, to their smiling faces and bright eyes, and I hurt them. “There’s another ship,” I inform them dutifully, and they panic.  

 

The first one of us to die is Green. He jumps out of our boat to swim up to the big ship in the distance. He thinks everyone is as gentle-hearted as him. The rest of us aren’t so sure, but we stay quiet.   

His body floats back to us later, sharpened metal rods poking in and out of him at odd angles, a cloud of red trailing behind in mourning. The water carries him with a heavy heart. I hope he was right, and I will see him again one day.  

Somehow, I know I won’t.  

 

We sit in our boat, less talkative these days, but more determined. Red still laughs when she can, but I see the brokenness of it. She tells me she used to live on a ship like the one we saw, but it was sunk by a bigger one. “You can’t trust other people.” She imparts this truth to me sadly. “They’ll always hurt you if they can.”  

We should have known.  

“What about me?” I ask. “You trusted me.”  

“You aren’t other people,” Red explains. “You’re like us.”  

I nod in agreement, and paddle at a steady pace. Red shoves her oar roughly, and for a moment I can see a harpoon in her hands, staining the water with the blood of people who aren’t us.  

She sees me staring, and the next few strokes are more gentle.  

 

The second one to die is Red. Objects litter our path, strange and dangerous. Yellow says that means we are getting close, and I believe her. For a while we can swerve to avoid the shapes bobbing in our way, but then we hit something sharp and heavy, and the boat starts filling up. The leaks won’t plug. We have to abandon ship.  

Without a boat, I’m not sure how far we can get, but Yellow is confident we’re close. We swim for a long time. Red can’t keep up. I think she is tired of shipwrecks. I don’t blame her for being tired. She promises to catch up, clinging to a wooden crate, but we know she won’t. We leave her behind, and when I take one last look behind me she is floating in the water, staring at the sky. I hope that when the water takes her, it will be gentle and kind, like it was to me.   

 

Yellow and I are swimming. The water is thick, and fights our every stroke.  

“Where are we going?” I ask her. I never bothered to before.  

“Somewhere else, far from here,” she says with difficulty. “Somewhere I’ve only heard about in stories. Maybe your sun will be there.”  

I want to tell her that she’s my sun, that I would have been happy sitting with them all in our boat forever, letting the waves take us where they may. But she has lost so much already, so I follow her without complaint. She needs to see it.   

The refuse piles thick enough that we can climb out of the water and walk on top of it. I’m walking on pieces of boats of all sizes and huge crates of cargo that make different sounds when you step on them and a few corpses and gold statues of gods and goddesses and heroes and bottles of liquid and little brass coins shaped like stars and waterlogged books in languages I can’t read and wax candles and clumps of silk that leak their dye onto everything and swords and metal things that aren’t swords and things that don’t look like anything at all. Yellow takes my hand in hers and leads us through the wreck. She knows where to go.  

 

The third one to die is Yellow. We walk across the ocean, so close to where she wants to go, and she doesn’t make it.   

I am looking down, keeping an eye out for anything new, when her hand is ripped from mine. She cries out and falls face first, hitting the surface of the junk heap with a hard crack. I run to see what tripped her–a tangle of gold and silver chains studded with gems. I rip them off and toss them aside, scattering a few loose amethysts and diamonds that roll into cracks and caverns, forever lost. She doesn’t move. I shake her a bit. Her arms are splayed out where they failed to catch her fall. I know she is dead before I flip her over. I do it carefully, disbelievingly. Her eyes are open, drained of warmth. Her head is split and leaking things onto my hands.  

I find a section of the refuse that is looser, and make a hole to lay her body in, next to some broken glass and picture frames with no picture in them.  

“I’ll keep going,” I promise.  

  

I don’t find a ship. I don’t find anything. I don’t know which way to go without Yellow. 

I’m tired and sad and angry. At least if I leave this place, I won’t be reminded of them. There’s no end to the ocean. There’s no horizon. It’s more of the same.    

I lay down on the smooth wooden surface of a bookcase. It bobs gently beneath me. I lean my head to the left and poke at some jars of dead flies and sand and blue powder. They drift far enough that I can see a bit of water between them. It’s purple. The one I liked best. The color of my eyes. I thrust my hand into it, and it’s like cool water on a searing burn. It feels right.   

I kick the junk pile around, trying to make the hole bigger. I shove my arm in, then my face. I pull myself out, and my skin itches and hurts, screaming to return. I dip my feet in, then slide my body into the hole, up to my waist. The water welcomes me lovingly. It missed me, it wants me back. We all tried to get away from it, but this is where we belonged all this time. The water always takes us.  

I hope Green was wrong about being reborn somewhere else. I don’t want to see the sun anymore.   

I take a breath and push the rest of myself into the water, then grab the edge of the bookcase and pull it over the hole. I float, but so does everything else, which is packed too tightly together to let me pass. My hands brush the edge of the bookcase, my toes touch something like wet paper. I am encased in water, enveloped in the cloud of purple. It swirls around my shoulders like a silk shawl. I feel it slide up to my neck and twist tighter, and I close my eyes. And then I start to sink. The purple strands are wrapping around me and pulling me down, down, down into the deep. The further I sink, the warmer it feels. I start to lose feeling in my fingertips. My lungs ache, but when I open my mouth the water soothes them. Everything is still and quiet and right.  

I am the last one to die. I give in to the ocean’s whispers, to the madness of the empty horizon. I let the water take me, and then all of us are lost.