The Southern Sun

Like trying to find shade in a land with no night.

  In the North, we use the death penalty. We kill our criminals, in a way. We give them a knife and an empty room and we lock the door. We are all hurting, but it's our choice. To hurt is to endure, to endure is to live, and to live is to want to die. We call it limbo, those hours in the empty room. The time before the end. Those cowardly minutes probably scrap away at your soul. I can relate.

     Everyone dies during limbo, but there's a secret. There's a fine-print that my father, my Warden- the Warden of the North- told me. If you truly want to live, if you believe you deserve to live, you do. The door opens after three days, and they are always dead, they are always holding that awful knife, but “they chose to die”, he would say. “We would have given them another chance if they had wanted to live.” Simple. Sit in the dark for 72 hours, shivering, believing in your innocence and then you get to live. It's almost poetic. But everyone uses the knife. Poetry is for those too foolish for this life.

     It's been two days for me so far. I think. The animal-woman comes sometimes, she snarls and hisses and gives me some kind of roots soaked in oil. It tastes like greasy potato skin, but burned. And dry. Okay, it's tastes like effing dirt.

     After I eat, she tries talking with me again. Technically, we speak the same language, but it's more than words, speech. Our mouths move differently. Her tongue seems sharper than mine, her teeth snap at every sound, like that Licker's teeth around Leif. She wants answers, I want home. I want someone who speaks not just to me, but with me.

Every conversation is the same.

     “What are the Northerners' plans?” Silence.

     “What is your name?” Silence.

     “What is the North's weakness?” Silence. I'm getting good at this.

     Then she takes out a brush, the painting kind. I wasn't exactly intimidated the first time, honestly, I was barely shocked. All the artists I know are effing crazy. Makes sense.

     The first time she painted on me, it took a couple of minutes to start working. She uses oil, the same oil from the roots I have in my stomach right now, but she puts some foul smelling chemical in it first. The fumes might as well scream ¨Don't drink me. You will die'. So she's painting my shoulder and arm for the first time, and I was honestly so confused. She explained, “Our sun is stronger than yours,”, we don't even have a sun up North, you stupid woman, “We use it to get answers. We use its power,”. My eyebrows do not go higher than that. Then, she bit my fricking arm. Hard. Her mouth filled up with blood and she grinned at me. Red teeth. “Our sun doesn't like you, it wants to burn you all away”, my arm started to prickle, tickle almost. The bite only throbbed. I needed stitches. I still do, but I need a lot of things right now.

     After she left, the burning started. The oil on my arms and back, bubbled- or was it my skin bubbling? My body hissed like grease in a frying pan. My skin, my skin.

     She comes back to ask me questions every couple of hours, and she bites me. She can only paint me after I've healed. Enough. Just enough to survive her next session.The stench of chemicals soaking into baby-pink flesh. And then red throbbing flesh. Flesh that used to be mine, flesh that is becoming part of the desert, soon Zefirino won't exist anymore. I want to say I got used to it after the first week. I didn't.

     I think it has been two weeks now. The sun never goes down. It flirts with the horizon sometimes, but it never commits.

I'm hurting. I'm hurting so much. I want to be strong, but I'm not. I want to spit at her, at all of her kind. I want to bite them. I want to grab the bone in her cheek and rip it out. I want anything, anything other than array burning swirls and bite marks and the sun laughing down onto my insignificant, broken body. The days scrape my soul, and my lips bleed when I smile. Why, why am smiling?

    Then, he came. When the unforgiving sun was low in the sky, and the Heathens were in their tent. His lips don't bleed like mine, but they don't smile like mine either. He looks like a storm. He has the skin of a Heathen, the sunbaked brown skin- but his hair is all wrong. The people of the South have blond, almost white hair. His head, even with the lying sunset as a backdrop, is covered in dark curly locks. Weird.

    “You're still alive?” He sounds weird too. Silence. “Fine, don't say anything. You're obviously about to die,” He shrugs, and it's the shrug that gets me. He shrugged at me. I'm coughing and bleeding and suddenly speaking- for the first time in weeks.

     “Do not shrug at me.”, I would have been a good mom, I have the tone of voice already, “I'm not going to die here. I'm going to die with an axe in my hand and socks on my feet. Like we're supposed to.” Another cough. This is going extremely well.

    “Then I'd better get a pair of socks for you,”, his eyes are gray. Actually gray. It's not ugly, though. Weird.

    He has a long, thin, hooded coat on, I notice it when he leans down and unties me. I wish I still had my shirt. And maybe some more skin. Suddenly, these things matter again.

     It's when he picks me up, I realize it's another hallucination. People don't pick me up. I'm heavy- it is my job to be heavy, I pick people up. There is a reason Niko encouraged the use of “vitamins” in his soldiers' diet. Steroids make you strong. Steroids do not mean weird gray-eyed men can pick you up like a bag of onions. Why onions, Rino? Why?

     “What is happening right now?” My voice is so small. Why?

     “I think I'm saving you.” His forehead is wrinkled, he is confused. Why?

     “Do you know why?”, Why me, why now, why you, why this? I'm in a truck. It's smaller than the one Leif and Nikolai took all those soul-scraping hours ago. Days, I mean. Weeks? When I feel the seat rub against my back, I know I'm going to pass out. I don't have enough blood left to soak the fabric behind me, but I'm about to try aren't I? The Weird One's forehead looks like Niko's. Old man. I smile and taste blood. Not the desert's blood, my blood. 1289-ZW. Me.

    “You didn't answer.”

     Just before the first darkness I've seen in days swallows me, I see him shrug.

                     -Zefirino Winterfast, 1289-ZW, 90yrs a.t.e.

   
 
   
   

   
   

Author's Note

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