Sunsets

I.1

A cloud settled in front of the giant peach-like sun, tinting it a glowing orange. A little girl stared at it through a dirty little window in a dirty little house. The child was plain in appearance; grey eyes and mousy brown hair that would never curl into perfect angel ringlets. She was so unlike her sister, as the girl’s mother always reminded her. Her sister was perfect; a beautiful, darling girl of eight whose blonde curls and deep sapphire eyes gave her the appearance of a cherub. She was everything the little girl at the dirty window yearned to be.2

The little girl knew her mother hated her; it was apparent in every glance, every reprimand and in the visage of disgust the mother seemed to always possess when she laid eyes on her homely daughter.3

The little girl could only escape her mother’s loathing when Daddy was home. Unlike his wife, he loved his little daughter, plain as she was. While other father’s would brag of how lovely their daughters were, Daddy would boast his daughter’s brain and claimed she had more knowledge stuffed in her cranium than Albert Einstein! When Daddy was home, the little girl felt loved, but more importantly, she felt safe around him. Every night, she would gaze out of the little dirty window in the attic for him to come home, which was what she was doing that night it happened.4

She was in her normal seat by the window, legs pulled against her chest and chin resting atop her scabby knees. He was late tonight. Usually he would be home in time to watch the sunset with her but the burning star was nothing but a sliver of red peeking between hanging tree leaves.5

“He’s not coming home tonight.”6

The little girl turned from the window to see the tall figure of her mother shadowed in the attic’s dying light and bathed in its redness. She could not make out the features of her face, but the little girl could see in them something so strange and unknown that it frightened her.7

“Why?” the little girl asked in a trembling voice. Although her mother hurt her, the little girl had never been afraid of her mother. It was a strange feeling.8

“Shut up, it doesn’t matter.” Her voice was different too, hollow and croaking. She sounded like the crazy people the little girl saw in picture shows. This wasn’t the mother she knew.9

“I’m glad he’s not here. He always defends you; says there’s more to a child than beauty, says you’ve got brains. Well what are brains to a mother, huh? I only asked for a pretty child, is that too much for you to comply with? You’re so selfish, only thinking of yourself, not caring that you ugly. Well what about me? Do you know what it’s like for a mother to have an ugly daughter? It’s the worst thing that could happen to me, that’s what it is. I hate it! I hate you, I hate you!”10

She was screaming, her voice becoming shriller and more impassioned. The little girl began to cry, silently sobbing as her mother declared the truth the little girl had always known but had never heard pass her mother’s lips.11

“I’m going to fix this. I should be the mother with the prettiest daughter’s in this town and for that to happen I can’t have you. You’re too ugly to be my daughter.” her mother’s words were now cold with a resolve as steely as the kitchen knife she produced from her apron pocket. “I’m going to fix it,” she whispered, advancing on the little girl.12

“Mama?” the little girl whispered, not recognizing the woman who walked towards her glowing of red sunlight, with crazy eyes and mouth and a shining knife held aloft in her hand. “Mama, stop, you’re scaring me.”13

“I’m not your mother!” she screamed as she lunged for her daughter. The little girl screamed in innocent terror and scrambled to her feet to escape her wild mother. However, her little legs could not move as quickly as her mother’s long pair. The little girl was snatched up by her braided hair and pulled against her mother’s body. There were no words spoken except the little girl’s constant litany of “stop, Mama, stop!”14

The mother breathed in wild, heaving gasped, trying to keep her purchase on her flailing daughter with one hand and keep the knife in her other. The little girl was screaming now, shrieking for her father, her sister, God, somebody to come and save her. The sane part of her mother’s brain, however small, knew the little girl’s screams could be heard by the neighbors who would most likely come to investigate. She clamped a hand over the little girl’s mouth, drawing her head backwards and exposing her small, fragile neck.15

Screaming sobs of terror flowed freely from the little girl, muffled by her mother’s hand. She felt something cool and sharp rest on her neck and then, pain. It was a pain unlike anything the little girl had ever experienced. She had fallen off bikes and out of trees. She had stepped on rusty nails and scraped her knees. She had even broken bones before but none of these hurts compared with the wound that dripped blood as red as the light her mother was bathed in.16

The little girl felt the knife once again be drawn across her neck, insinuating more pain that she was so desperate to stop. Without thinking, she bit down on the hand that covered her mouth. There were two sensations that occurred to her then: the copper taste of blood in her mouth and the harpy’s shriek her mother cried. She dropped the knife and loosened her hold on her daughter, who then tore herself free and ran.17

She ran down the attic stairs, down the hall, downstairs again and then out the door to hide in the trees behind her home. She crawled under a leafy bush, holding a hand to her bleeding neck and gasping hard. Her terrified eyes flickered endlessly, half expecting the crazed woman to appear for her. The little girl simply sat cocooned in that bush, waiting for her father to come home.18

II.19

“And that’s where he found me when he finally came home,” my grandmother concludes.20

I sit in numb horror, staring at the woman who means so much to me. How could a mother do such a thing? I have heard of women suffering from post-partum depression, but I have never heard of a woman with two growing children attempting to slit her daughter’s throat simply because she wasn’t attractive enough for the mother’s tastes!21

I have always seen the scar on my grandmother’s throat and have always wondered how she attained it. My child mind had spun some fanciful tale of her in some grand adventure in some deep, dark jungle and meeting some horrid cannibal and only escaping with her life and that scar.22

The truth, I discover, is so much worse than my fiction.
I had finally plucked up the courage to ask her about it. Anyone else would dismiss her story for false, but I know her better. She never lies and as she related to me her tale, I saw truth in her grey eyes.23

She didn’t have to tell me, but she did. Later, when she had gone away to her room, I sit in out on the grass, watching the sunset. It occurs to me that this is exactly what she had done. I am entranced by its beauty and the serene calm it fills me with. Is this what she felt when she would sit by that dirty window? I have never thought of the sun in this way; my atheist mind thought of it as some great mass of swirling energy that rules our world. All purely scientific. 24

Now, I see the sun through her eyes. 25