Bring me the Sun

1.

Akk was seven years old when he wished he could touch the Sun and it betrayed him, burning his skin.

It was a day like many others – by now Akk had given up trying to tell them apart or call them by their own names – one chased the other without caring to leave any marks as clues, and he wasn't fast enough to keep up with them.

It was supposed to be a Tuesday, though; he had heard it said on television, while watching the news, as he was eating his breakfast. It was the only thing he was allowed to watch if he really had to entertain himself with what his mother referred to as “futile pastimes”. The embellished man who enunciated the weather forecast appeared to Akk’s innocent eyes almost like a magician capable of guessing the fate of heaven and earth, tapping with his magic wand on the screen behind him displaying the map of Thailand.

“Today is expected to be an extremely hot day,” the magician warned. Akk held the spoon suspended between the plate and his mouth, his mind ready to plan the course of his morning.

Akk was so busy planning his adventure in the garden, that the man’s advice to stay indoors went completely unheard.

He jumped off his chair, pouring his now cold soup into the pot of the nearest plant – the one in the corner, next to the entrance, which Akk often fed with his leftovers. Then, he looked outside.

The sun had risen. He considered it as a person – a friend, even – and he seemed in a good mood. Akk wanted to play, chasing his rays. One of them had just spread placidly over the dining room table, right in front of his empty bowl. His lips trembled as he barely held back a satisfied smile, “You'll see, this time I'll catch you.”

*   ☼   *

Akk sneaked out of the back door, the one used exclusively by the servants, with a sandwich held hostage between his teeth. He looked around and sighed, happily. Everything was more beautiful when the sun was shining.

*   ☼   *

Akk was running to avoid being caught by his mother's men. They were dressed in black, perpetual frowns on their faces even when he gave them a his most dimpled smile. Soulless soldiers, he thought. Sometimes, like now, he liked to imagine them as monsters who wanted to kidnap him and he, a knight on the run, had to dodge them without leaving a trace of himself. He had always been good at it: it was easy to play hide and seek if no one bothered to look for you.

The clothes that his nanny, Sani, had washed and ironed only a few hours earlier were wrinkled and filthy to say the least. His ruffle socks sported patches of soil that looked like irregular polka dots, disappearing into a pair of worn shoes with peeling black paint. They were new, but were getting too tight for Akk; just like so many other things he stopped caring about.

A spike of heath shot through him, suddenly, the sharp tang of salt blooming in his mouth as a trickle of salt slid down his upper lip.

It's normal, he reasoned to himself. As he did so, he scratched his face once, twice, three times, and began rubbing it with gradual insistence, sticking his nails into the delicate skin for relief. He had never felt such an itch, but on the other hand that day he had outdone himself; the Sun had wanted to exhaust him with that sun-beam catching session.

Clad in his immaculate shorts, he had walked the perimeter of the estate like a marathon runner, going from trampling the vegetables resting in the fields to upsetting the peace that reigned in the garden. Then, taking the entrance of the ivy labyrinth to which the gardeners of the house were making some adjustments, he ended up attracting too much anger disguised as preoccupation and finally, someone realized that Akk existed.

Therefore, the child ran. No longer for fun, but to rebel against those hands that wanted to grab him. His mother’s monsters’ bony fingers seemed to create hollows in his hips when he did not behave like a good boy and had to be put, quite literally, in his place; when he did not obey the order of becoming a miniature puppet to be exhibited in public; when he threw a tantrum before being dragged to gala dinners, painting auctions, horse races.

He wanted to fight for his freedom, perhaps continuing to run and then, if caught, he would kick, bite and scream with every ounce of his strength. But something prevented him from being the dauntless paladin he imagined himself to be.

The incessant itching faded gradually gave way to a much more unpleasant sensation. Fire flared up within his gut, climbing up his throat. Before he could vomit it out like a dragon from a fairytale, his breath caught stuck in his esophagus, leaving him gasping like a fish out of water. Akk tried to scream, but only managed to produce increasingly feeble moans. One hand slapped his forehead repeatedly in an attempt to attenuate the stinging that was invading his skin as if covered with a swarm of ticks; the other clung to the dirt of the ground on which he fell with a dull thud.

He had never felt this way, as if suddenly life was slipping away from his limbs.

He opened his eyes for a moment, but it was as if his irises were being targeted by a million stings of bees. As he tried to squint to see something, he couldn’t find a sensible answer to what he was looking at. His eyesight was an oil painting of burnt orange, vermilion red and ochre yellow. That's how he realized he had lost.

It was the Sun that caught him, in the end.

*   ☼   *

By the time Mr. Chadok found him, a terrifying decoupage of pustules and purple-streaked patches had bloomed violently on Akk's face; rashes that covered his neck and arms like clouds dirty with mud.

When the doctor gave them an answer, he called it the disease of the Sun and as a fervent admirer of that glowing star, he now became a son of the night.

As Akk began to regain consciousness, a few words – recluse... no contact... Sun...  – marked the beginning of his new rebirth. A life resisting in a state of death. It did not end him, but kept him attached to invisible machines that pumped darkness into his veins, while he breathed the desolation from the tracheal cannulas.

As small child, Akk portrayed summer days in his many scribbles; the Sun towering in the upper right corner in each of them, colored with the richest yellow pastel in his arsenal. It was always the main character, larger than palaces and people, more sumptuous than the statues of a temple.

It took him several summers to forget how much he had waited for those moments in the light.

It began in that miserable way; the story of the good hero who turned into a villain, his victim made of tissue paper, pierced, crumpled, and imprisoned in a crystal case.

One was the Sun, the other was Akk.

Author's notes

Let me know if you'd like to read more!! I might update twice a week :)