The Boy and the Sun

A boy once stood in the desert and looked into the sun.

Or so my people told me. They say he walked through the oppressive sand dunes about the very same Sahara-bound village I grew up in, a young boy of only eight. His father had been lost in a sandstorm two years ago, and his mother dead in childbirth. He spent his days wandering- and then one day, in the village center he stopped, and stood, gazing straight up into that unseeable point of the sun. That single, white-hot drop of flame that splashed and melted into the sky. And he stared at it.

For the first hour or so, the people went on. But then one boy noticed his eyes were watering, he was crying sorrowless tears, running furrows into his warm cheeks. The second boy ran to his father, tugged on his sleeve. And the father came.

“What are you doing, boy?” He said. “Don’t you know looking into the sun is bad for your eyes?”

But the boy’s eyes did not come off the blazing sun for a second. “It’s beautiful,” He said. “It is beautiful.”

The father looked into the sky, to see if he could see what the boy saw. All he saw was the sun. “It’ll ruin your eyes, boy!” he said. His brow furrowed in consternation, and he wondered why the boy was so enraptured.

The boy’s arm suddenly rose, and he pointed at it. “But look!” He cried, pointing straight up as if the heavens had tied a string to his finger and were trying to hoist him away. “Look at it! Look at how beautiful it is!”

By now several passersby had stopped, and they all gazed upward. They shaded their eyes, muttered, and looked at the sun. Their eyes darted round it, but all they saw was the searing light.

“But boy, it is only the sun!” said the father insistently, and worriedly. “It has always been there, it always will! It gives us light; it gives us day! But it hurts to look at!”

But the boy stared into the hole in the sky, the sun melting the very fabric of the sky in which it was anchored, like a phoenix captured somehow in a coin. “But look at how beautiful it is! It burns in such a flame! It has power! It has beauty! It is life! It is death! It glows; it burns brightly, smolders darkly!” He gazed even more intently, as if the strength of his eyes could hold the sun in place. “It has witnessed creation! It will witness destruction! It has seen my father, my father’s father, it has seen me, and now I see it!”

The father looked at the sun one last time. He could not look at it though, despite his best efforts his eyes traced the blue about the hole in the sky, they darted away. He only saw a moving button, a bright yellow button that could not be fixed on.

But nonetheless, the child stared at it unblinking. “See!” He screamed. “It burns to the depths of the sky! It is melting through the world! It will never stop! It is beautiful!”

And indeed, the sun burned beautifully, burning a neat hole into the sky, melting everything it touched. But then the father shouted, for he realized that the child was not crying, that the sun was not burning into the sky. The sun was burning back into the child’s eyes, deep and hot, and the liquid of his eyes was falling away like tears.

The father cried, and covered the child’s eyes, and sobbed in horror.

The child screamed. “No! It is beautiful! Let me see it! I need it, I need it!” He thrashed and writhed. He fought like a drowning man, wriggling in the sand, throwing it in the air, trying to pry the father’s hands off of where his eyes once were. But the father sobbed resignedly, and pressed his strong, cool hands to the child’s face. Eventually he was subdued, and lay still.

The child never saw again, blinded by the sun. But he once told my father that it was better to have seen and been blind then to have never seen at all.

Or so my people told me. The people still mutter, and shake their heads. But they still look at sun bemusedly, and wonder what the child saw that they were blind to. I do too; I gaze into the sun, and look. But I don’t really see it. My eyes dart around it, incapable of fixing directly on that little yellow coin. No matter how much willpower I put into it, I cannot see what he saw. Maybe I do not believe him, and his tale of beauty. I shouldn’t.

Or so my people tell me.

Written 3-31-09, 8:35 PM

Revised 4-10-09 7:30 PM
By Ben Chamberlain