Sunsets

The scream reached him first.

It came thin and far away, like something torn loose from a dream and given breath. Magnus surfaced from sleep in a single sharp inhale. The room around him held its silence too tightly, the way a held note eventually becomes impossible to distinguish from silence.

He rolled onto his side, heart pulling tight, and stared toward the pull-out bed in the corner. The small reading lamp above his bed spread its little beam of yellow over the blankets, but the rest of the room lay in the kind of darkness that feels arranged, as if someone had ironed it flat. The bed was empty. The mattress still dented the way it had been when she’d sat there hours ago.

“Mom . . .” he whispered.

Nothing answered.

He stayed still, listening. Another scream — distant, not a dream — dissolved into the constant hum of machinery somewhere deep in the building. Then footsteps. Slow. Coming closer.

The strip of light under his door blinked out. A deeper darkness reached into the room like a tide.

He stopped breathing.

The footsteps halted outside. A handle creaked. Hinges sighed. A slice of colder air brushed his skin.

Someone was inside.

“Mom . . .?” It cracked out of him before he could swallow it back.

No reply.

He could hear breathing now. Not his. Quick, shallow, as if a person were gulping air between words he couldn’t hear. Magnus pressed himself into the mattress, trying to make himself small.

“Who . . . who are you?” he whispered.

A shape detached itself from the deeper shadow by the door. It moved toward him without sound, settling close enough that his reading light carved out the silhouette of a man.

“What do you want?” he breathed. “Is my mom okay?”

The silhouette dipped its head once. A quiet nod, deliberate and slow.

Magnus swallowed. “Are you a flower . . . or a mushroom?” he asked, because the question rose before he could stop it, and silence was worse.

The figure didn’t answer. Not through ignorance, but distraction. Its head moved in a jerky motion, as though trying to watch something only it could see, tracking invisible paths on the wall. The reading light above Magnus flickered once, twice . . . and died.

A blindfold of black was pulled over everything.

Magnus’s pulse thudded loud enough to hear. He could make out the faint rhythm of the man’s voice now, low and muttering, as if he were praying to the walls or arguing with them. The sound drifted closer to his bedside. He was sure that if he reached out now he could probably touch him.

Magnus forced the next thought to his tongue because all he had left were words. “How . . . how is it possible to see forty-four sunsets in one day?”

The muttering stopped.

Silence stretched thin, as though the darkness was thinking. Then the voice came back, even closer than before. A man’s voice. Not harsh. Not monstrous. Just tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.

“I know only one way,” it said. “But why do you ask?”

Magnus gripped the sheets. “I’m looking for the secret story inside my book. The little prince is very fond of sunsets. One day he saw forty-four. The pilot says it’s because the prince’s planet is so small he can keep moving his chair, but that’s not true. The pilot gets things wrong. When he’s wrong, the prince says nothing back. So . . . how else can you see forty-four sunsets in one day?”

A breath. Like someone remembering a wound.

“There is a way,” the voice said. “I have seen many sunsets. Too many. And sometimes . . . sometimes I fear my day will never end. I would do anything for it to end.”

“Really?” Magnus whispered. “And when you’re sad . . . do you love the sunset?”

“Yes.”

The word pressed against the space between them. Magnus reached for his fox teddy. He pulled it in and held it tight. 

There was a closeness now, an invisible warmth where the figure leaned in.

“I know an old saying about sunsets,” the man said. “Would you like to hear it?”

Magnus nodded before remembering the man couldn’t see. “Okay.”

The voice recited softly, as though the dark itself were listening:

“There is no death. Death is very much like sunset. It is only an appearance. For when the sun sets here, it rises elsewhere. In reality, the sun never sets. Likewise, death is only an illusion, an appearance. For what is death here is birth elsewhere. For life . . . is endless.”