"And they rode away into the sunset..." Joseph finished fanatically. His little sister, Sally, stared at him in a mix of awe and confusion.
"What's a sunset?" She asked hopeful, her legs crisscrossed on the ground, hands under her chin. Joseph looked at her with a sad smile.
"Well, I don't know, but granddad saw one once," he answered reminiscently, recalling the moment in his life when his granddad was still around, sharing stories no one else seemed to want to talk about.
Sally frowned, disappointed at the lack of knowledge.
"Anyway, I've got to go to work. See ya, Sally," Joseph said as he got up and walked out the front door.
For a moment or two, all Sally did was sit there staring at nothing, thinking of the word 'sunset'. She was too curious. Curious enough to stand up and walk into the kitchen were her mother stood.
"Momma?"
"Yes, dear?" Her mother said distractedly.
"What's a sunset?" Sally asked sweetly.
Her mother stopped flipping through her cookbook and looked over at her daughter on surprise, but recovered quickly. "I'm not sure sweetheart. I don't think I've heard of the word."
Sally knew her mother was lying to her face, but decided not to argue. Instead, she took matter into her own hands.
Wanting to know more, Sally exited the kitchen, marched up the stairs and into her room. She spent twenty minutes tearing it apart for answers, then spent another ten putting only back together. Exasperated, she repeated this process with her brother's room, and a bit more carefully with her parent's room.
Throughout all her searching, she still found nothing to help her curiosity.
Her body felt like jelly after moving and looking behind all the furniture. She sighed heavily and sat in the hallway, disappointed once again. But, leaning her head against the wall, she noticed a small, door-like structure on the ceiling. The attic. She couldn't believe she hadn't thought about the attic!
Her energy suddenly came back to her and she stood, hurrying over to look up at the door. She quickly ran to her room to grab a small, wooden chair and placed it beneath the door. Even with the chair, she was still too short to reach the door on her toes.
Jumping desperately, she managed to grasp the small handle with her tiny fingers. The door yanked out of its spot in the ceiling and Sally landed hard on the chair, cracking it down the middle.
She fell onto the floor with a loud thump that her mother somehow managed to miss. Luckily the door stayed open and the ladder tumbled out, landing in front of her and covering her with a thick layer of dust.
Her smile grew on her face and she scrambled over to the ladder. She climbed slowly, afraid the ladder would break as the chair had. With every movement she made, the ladder creaked unstabally.
Sally managed the last few rungs before successfully throwing herself into the gloomy attic. She was surrounded by rotted boxes, torn lams with broken bulbs, and stacks of old books and photo albums.
She stood up slowly. As she looked around the attic, she noticed a single box that seemed older and dustier than the rest.
She strode over to it and knelt down to carefully open it without tearing anything.
The cardboard was stiff with age and dust tumbled down the sides. But as she peered inside, the first thing she saw was a canvas turned upside down. She flipped it over to reveal the front.
Sally was immediately mesmerized by a burst of colors that streaked across the canvas.
Shades of oranges, yellows, and reds blended together, meeting a bright curvillinear shape in the middle, half of it cut off by a piece of land, making up the lower half of the painting. On that half, tiny figures ran about jumping on obstacles. They looked happy. Different even.
And at the very bottom, a shot message was scribbled in cramped, cursive writing.
"July 27, 2022
Paradise Park, WA
Sunset at 7:55 pm"
Sunset.
A sunset.
Sally looked out the window of the attic. But there was no beautiful mix of bright, fiery colors. She had never noticed it before, how horribly glum the sky looked. In the past, she listened to her parents and her teachers tell her that the sky was just full of clouds. But now, she looked further in the distance, finding the large pipes protruding from factory buildings and chimneys and cigarettes emitting billows of smoke and toxins.
The realization flipped her brain like a trampoline would flip her body. The smoke and toxins filled the sky the way food filled her stomach.
The painted sunset, in what could only be her granddad's, was what was being covered at this very moment with blankets of grey and black.
How could it have been possible? For the brightness and glory of a sunset to be hidden so well, for so long?
What had their world come to, and how had it gone so wrong?
YOU ARE READING
When We Saw the Sunset
Krótkie Opowiadania"What's a sunset?" Sally asked her brother. "I don't know, granddad told me about it a long time ago," he replied. Sally was disappointed yet curious. After her brother had left, she went searching for answers and landed upon the attic. There was a...
