Who Loves the Sun?
by Ava Reitmaier Stone
Late summer. Sweat sticks to the buzzing air. Lehna’s toes dig a hole into a balding patch of crabgrass. Sprawled across a lawn chair in her backyard, sporting only a sagging pair of bloomers, Lehna chain smokes and reads the same three beaver magazines with the solemnity of a monk. The world has taken on a decided staleness this August, with everything adopting the limp itchiness of unwashed bed sheets. All the grass in Alpharetta, Georgia has turned the colour of duck bills. The tap water has started to taste like pepper and milk powder. The price of instant coffee has risen by 75 cents.
The Sun beats down relentlessly. It seems that this summer, the nature of its glare has shifted from merciless to desperate. Lehna never found the Sun to be particularly joyful. It always seemed a bit perverted to her. Voyeuristic. But then again, even the lobsters at the super-market seemed a bit perverted to her.
If one has been alone for a long time, they start to become very protective of their aloneless. They start to get selective about the things that can crawl through their windows. Lehna has stopped letting the Sun through her windows. If she ever wants to see it, she gets as naked as she feels like being and lies in her lawn chair.
She is 48, and she's never been kissed. She never left the obsessive virginal phase that most shed in their youth. It has stayed with her, mutating as it survived past its anticipated expiration date. With all the perverse naivete and jumping eyes of a teenage boy and all the apathetic discontent of a middle-aged woman, most people find Lehna off-putting.
Lehna looks at the grass. She wonders if watering it would help, or if her hose has been what turned it this colour. She tries to remember the last time she made boxed mac and cheese, and what it had looked like. She had been stoned, she recalled. It hadn't been a good kind of stoned; it never was anymore. It was the kind of stoned that had made her quit her cashier position, the kind that had you feeling like a sack of shit dangling over a ravine.
With an achy dread, she thinks of her bed. Sleeping another night with her head on the same pillow makes her want to cry hot tears. The underside of her breasts are sweaty, and the folds of her stomach, the backs of her knees, armpits. She has been mixing canned iced tea concentrate into her tap water to make it taste less like diner dishwater. It has rotted her breath. Her hair is thin and pin straight. Her face has a lot of beauty. It sits on the tops of her cheeks in red constellations, in her cupid's bow, in the corners of her eyes.
A peeled orange sits among a dozen unpeeled oranges in a plastic shopping bag on the concrete.
A chain link fence stands to the left. It separates Lehna’s yard from the abandoned one next door. The fence stops abruptly in the middle of the shared lot, defeating its purpose altogether.
The Sun hisses and pops; it's been doing that lately. Nobody else has seemed to notice. Lehna squints at it.
“Gotta smoke?”
Lehna turns her head, squints harder. A face has appeared above the fence, an arm languidly extending beside it.
“Sure.”
She makes no effort to offer the face a cigarette. Standing up wasn't on her afternoon itinerary. Besides, if she can make it uncomfortable enough, maybe the face will go away. Her gruffness doesn't seem to bother the face, however, which Lehna can now make out is ringed with the kind of peroxide locks that make her sour.
The face belongs to one 23-year-old Cady Lebowski, the kind of girl who sits in the backseat and gets dirt under her manicure. The kind who can't cook.
“You gonna offer me one?”
Lehna has returned to observing her magazine. She jerks her head to the right indicatively; cigarette ash dribbles onto the pages of Escort.
Flouncing around the fence, Cady seats herself between the half-naked woman in the lawn chair and the bag of oranges. Lehna wordlessly hands her a cigarette and a light.
The Sun sputters. Looking at the sky with vague concern, Cady rolls her painted lips into her mouth. She’s still young enough to smudge her lipstick.
“Have you noticed that it's been doing that?”
Lehna fixes her eyes on the Sun.
“Yeah.”
“Ever happened before?”
Lehna shrugs.
“I've never seen it.” She looks down at her magazine for a moment; then she looks at Cady.
“The wind has stopped, too.”
“There's no wind in Alpharetta.”
Lehna half-turns and points to the weathervane on the roof of her bungalow. Cady tries not to fixate on the grotesque twists of the woman’s skin. She's firmly resolved not to care.
“Moves all the time. Well, it used to. Hasn't budged in a week.” She turns back.
“It's like a lightbulb you know? It's gotta burn out eventually.”
“So what? Some man in a plane is gonna fly up there and switch out the Sun?” Cady’s brow furrows, consumed by the technicalities of changing the bulb in the sky.
Lehna sucks air between her teeth.
“No, they can't fix it. Or else everyone wouldn’t be ignoring it.”
Lehna waits for Cady to start crying. But she doesn't. Instead, she sits quietly for a while, and then she asks Lehna if she is in the mood to fix her some lunch.
“How long till it goes out?”
Standing in her kitchen, poised like a French monarch, Lehna fries eggs. She doesn't respond to the pile of limbs in her leather recliner. How was she supposed to know?
Cady hauls her elbows onto the armrest of the recliner, dropping her neck so that she is staring at Lehna upside-down. The woman is still practically naked, her bloomers an indescribable nothing kind of colour. Her kitchen a swarm of taupe and russet. Cady likes looking at her, the way that she likes smelling gasoline.
“A week?”
“A light bulb only starts sparking like that a few days before it shuts off.”
“So, soon then.”
Lehna splits the eggs onto two plates and walks them over to the recliner.
“Soon.”
Cady pushes her soles into the armrest opposite the one on which her elbows rest, pushing her knees into her chest like a loaded spring.
“So what the fuck? How come nobody cares? Asked my friend about it this morning. Looked at me like I was crazy.”
Lehna sinks into the suede couch opposite Cady. Even after so many years, her legs are still taut with the anticipation of being touched by another person. Lehna examines them the way that a young girl would: with the eyes of a man.
“It's not that they don't care. It's that if they admit that it's happening, then they have to confront it.”
“But like, it could all end today! Shouldn't we all be shooting up or something? Getting our goods while we still can?”
“The kind of people that would do that already have been doing it. Everyone just wants to keep on living the way they have been.”
Outside, the Sun spits.
A seafoam light fixture hangs to the left. A cluttered coffee table sits between them. It’s covered in empty cigarette packs, tarot cards, Playboy, rolling papers, a water bong, two untouched plates of eggs. The light is turned off, and its dead stillness makes the room feel like one big blanket with a rock in the middle.
Cady looks at it anxiously, then she asks Lehna for another cigarette. She sucks it as she looks out the screen door, hanging ajar.