Chasing Sunrise

One

I sat on a patch of dead grass beside Aunt Cassie's house as the sun rose. My skin already tingled as if I'd rubbed it with heat cream. Even though it was winter and the temperature below freezing, my jacket lay on the ground behind me, leaving my arms bare. With a deep breath of clean, chilled air, I braced myself for the full force of the oncoming pain.

The desert around me was quiet, and I was glad for that. It seemed that every animal I could think of that lived out here was poisonous in some way. Scorpions, rattlesnakes, various types of spiders––and I wasn't an outdoorsy person to begin with. I found myself taken in by the stillness of it all, though. There were no birds chirping, or leaves rustling in the wind, no distant sound of cars whooshing down the road, or buzz of an errant porch light attracting insects.

There was just the broad, flat Taos Valley with its deep, jagged line of canyon in the distance, and beyond that were the mountains, their sharp angles softened with a layer of evergreen trees. Now the sky was turning a deep, vivid pink with wispy clouds looking like they'd caught fire.

I felt more than saw the sunrise. One moment my skin burned with an annoying tingle, and the next it felt like I was laid out atop a hot griddle with molten metal poured over me. I was certain that my flesh was being incinerated this time, but I'd thought that last time and the time before. Clenching my teeth and holding my breath, I waited for the sensation to break. It had before, so it had to this time. Still I gripped my small gold cross pendant and prayed to any deity who would listen. I begged, mentally, for forgiveness for my weakness. Please, give me another chance, another day.

Tears leaked from my eyes, and that was the first sign I had that the pain was abating. Their cool tracks down my cheeks quenched the fire and that sensation spread across my face and down over the rest of my body.

And then it was all over, the external pain at least. It was just me, the silent desert, and the yawning chasm of emptiness I felt inside. Tears didn't ease that pain though. It was bottomless.

I pulled on my jacket, got to my feet, and took a good, long look at my aunt's house. It was, she told me, an "Earthship" and was made from all recycled materials. The walls were made from stacked used tires and rammed earth... or something like that. At least her weirdness was a distraction from an otherwise bleak life.

*

When I walked into the kitchen, Aunt Cassie blinked at me, as if surprised I was still there.

Which made sense. My arrival last night was the first time we'd seen each other since I was a baby. She and my recently murdered father hadn't been close.

Dad had always called her a kook, and the description fit. She had her hair up in two bunches, like a six-year-old might wear it, and her lean frame was engulfed in an enormous bathrobe that was faded in splotches, as if someone had poured bleach on it while it was crumpled on the floor. Ratty old flip-flops that looked like they'd been fished up out of a dumpster adorned her feet. Basically, she looked like you'd expect the owner of this Earthship house to look.

"Did you go out for a walk?" she asked.

"I wanted to watch the sunrise."

She gestured around the bizarre structure she lived in. "You can see the sunrise just fine from in here. The house is heated with passive solar, you know?"

I ran my gaze over the kitchen and tried to keep my face neutral. We were upstairs (the main entrance was upstairs because this thing was built into the side of a hill) and the two-story south wall was all windows.

Where we stood was a loft that included the kitchen and the bedroom where I'd slept. There was a banister that spanned the space between the end of the kitchen counters and the start of the stairs leading down to the room that Aunt Cassie used as her studio. Her bedroom was off that, a misshapen bump that jutted out from the otherwise boxy structure. My bedroom was a misshapen bump inside the structure, like a little cancerous growth anchored to the kitchen wall. My room wasn't open to the south-facing wall of windows, but I did have an east-facing window, which meant that my aunt was correct, I would have had a perfectly good view of the sunrise.