Under The Red Sun

The sunrise is vibrant and vivid this morning. It is a canvas covered with canyons of carmine, canary, rosy gold. The sun is a deep orangery red, like an eruption of flame. It burns red through the eyelids of sleeping villagers.

When they finally wake, their eyes go as wide as the sky above the horizon. As the sun rises higher and higher and the colour deepens in hue, their eye only go wider.

It douses the orchards in colour, edging the leaves in fire and gold. From some perspectives it appears as though entire fields are blazing.

The sun has risen red before, say the oldest villagers to their nieces and nephews and grandchildren who visit. It indicates a sunny day ahead. And a good harvest, when it sets red. Though, they add, they have never seen it quite so red.

Comforted, villagers open their windows and make their tea. The red fades from the sky, but the sun continues to burn.

People stand just outside their houses, staring eastward, waiting to see if the sun will shift to its standard pale golden shade, but it does not. As they watch it depends in hue, to a colour as rich as rose petals. The sky around it is clear grey blue, as on every other morning. When it becomes clear that the sun is not changing people disperse to carry on with their usual tasks. But as they occupy themselves with work and school the village settles into a space of uneasiness, or trepidation.

Children look outside their school windows while they are meant to be writing, straining their necks this ay and that to catch a glimpse of the red sun. Bank managers or theatre proprietors find themselves glancing skyward, as if to check that the sun hasn’t also suddenly dropped from the sky altogether. The sun remains, bright as a ruby catching candlelight over the village.

When night falls the sun descends like a heavy red fruit on a drooping tree branch. It does not lose its brightness nor its colour as it descends, bathing the village in such lurid light that it looks as though the white pavement is aflame. The last rays of it catch on the curling tops of the black cage that runs the perimeter of the cemetery. On another day, under a different sun, the cemetery is transformed momentarily into a trick of illumination, full of sunlight and lush with greenery. The villagers find themselves avoiding it, and he elongated shadows stretching behind headstones.

When the sun finally sets the villagers release deep breaths. The sky is dark and studded with stars, fathomless as the ocean. As it has always been.

The phenomenon of the red sun is discussed and pondered, and after much pontificating it is dismissed. It was an abnormality in the weather, they say. Nothing more.

The next day, as the clocks about the city begin to chime on the hour, arguig dawn, children wake and peer out their windows into the fields and farms where the trees are already black shadows against the red sun. Before the last clock has stopped chiming they are already out of their beds, running to fetch their parents.

Those who had been asleep, assured that the sun would rise yellow in a blue sky, wake quickly and look to the sky. Almost every eye is turned upward, where the sun burns like an ember among ashes.

The next day, when the sun is a red beacon above the town, the villagers shed their autumn coats and scarves. It is too hot, despite the summer having come and gone. They congregate in the shadows of awnings and trees. The shopkeepers fan themselves behind their counters, the bakers despise their ovens. The heat will pass, they say. It is only the vestiges of summer heat. The trees are changing colour more rapidly. In the green fields they stand out as brilliant as bonfires.

By noon on the fourth day, several trees have dropped most of their leaves. They were full and supple in the morning. As the clocks chime, they crisp and brown. They fall like acorns in the late summer, blanketing the warm pavement.

Following the rising sun on the fifth day the crows begin to caw. Several take to a tree, in entire flocks from the cemetery to the edges of town, they call to each other, giving frightening black-eyed stares to those few villagers brave enough to approach them with sticks or brooms. They do not move, do not even flinch or cower on their perches. They continue cawing, as punctual as roosters, more loudly than the clocks are chiming, until the last streak of red has faded from the sky and there are only clear blue skies around a red sun.

Then there is silence. To some people it seems as if they have gone deaf. Not even the leaves rustle or stir.

A sixth day and the villagers can feel the heat of the pavement and cobblestones through the soles of their shoes.

On the seventh day it is as hot as the hottest day of summer. Winter boots and coats are packed away. Strawberries and peaches begin to appear among the foliage. The children in the river claim that the rocks on the ever-growing riverbank have changed. It is a nest of stones like tigers eye and agate, with blackened veins, polished by the heat. In the fields snakes have emerged from the grass and lay across rocks. The air is as thick as warmed oil. A scholar refers to his books on weather, and eventually geography, where there are pictures of the desert, the vast desert where nothing can live and all that stirs is ash.

On the eighth day the children playing in the river, searching for treasure along the riverbank, notice something distinctly untreasurable. Regardless, they collect their findings, wrap them in their handkerchiefs, placing them carefully in their pockets, and return home. Those children who do not neglect to remember them take the bones from their pockets. Tiny bones bleached by the sun, still feathered in some places. With tufts of down found on the starlings and rooks that nest by the river. Without quite knowing how they know, the children are certain that the birds died from the heat.

The crows flock to the cemetery on the ninth day. They cover the fence all the way around, and perch on the curls of hot iron that decorate the bars. They do not appear bothered by the heat. They rustle their feathers in the wind, black as ebony, as dark as ink blots against the daytime. The cemetery itself is cooler than the village, as if a breeze flows through it that does not flow anywhere else. Yet no one will go there.

When the villagers wake on the tenth day, there is but one tree that has yet to drop its leaves. Against the grey stone and brown loam of the cemetery it is a riot of colour: bronze and gold, copper and crimson, umber and chartreuse.

The trees that have dropped their leaves are as brittle as veins, reaching into the sky.

And they are crowded with crows, each large and black with eyes like the stones on the riverbeds.

Following the eleventh day, when the villagers peer out their windows at the red sun, with hopelessness and dread, they do not see a single bird. Pure white bones decorate the trees, but the birds that remained through the heat have fled. All but the crows. There are always crows.

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Art by Don Simpson