The Sun That Never Rises

The Chesapeake Bay swallowed islands the way time swallows memories: quietly, completely, and without asking permission. Eli Tarp's island had already been swallowed once, in '78, when a storm took the northern third and left nothing but jagged rock and salt water where a dock had been. The second time was coming. Eli could feel it in his bones.

Miss Cora lived in a house that leaned to the left like a drunk trying not to fall over. She was either ninety or ninety-nine, Eli couldn't tell. Her skin was the color and texture of cured tobacco, and her eyes were the blue of bay water in winter—cold, shallow-looking, and full of something you couldn't see from the surface.

"You're the new one," she said. It wasn't a question.

"I am."

"The last one went quiet three days ago. I sent him soup. He didn't answer the door."

Eli set his suitcase down on the porch. It contained three shirts, a pair of jeans, and a letter from the labor bureau that said, in essence: We have a job for you. It pays well. Don't ask what for.

"Where do I sleep?"

"In the lighthouse. Or what's left of it. The light's been out for a while now. Nobody needs it anyway. Who sails these waters at night? Not living things."

The lighthouse stood on the island's highest point—a crumbling brick tower with a lens that had gone dark decades ago. Eli's room was a small square at the base with a cot, a kerosene lamp, and twelve iron pots stacked against the far wall. Each pot was different size, from a soup tureen to a bucket, and each one was filled with something dark and thick that smelled faintly of copper.

"What are these for?" Eli asked Cora, who was sitting in a rocking chair on the porch and watching him with the intensity of a hawk watching a field mouse.

"Stars," she said. "Every pot is a star. Every star needs fire. The last man understood that. Then he stopped understanding it. Then he stopped coming back from the water."

Eli didn't sleep that night. He sat on the cot and listened to the bay breathe against the island's shrinking bones, and he thought about the letter, and the money, and the way Cora's eyes had locked onto his when she said the last man stopped coming back.

At three in the morning, he went to the eastern shore. The fog was so thick he couldn't see his hand in front of his face. He found the groove in the rock—the same groove that Callahan and his predecessors had used, worn smooth by hands that were now dust or light or something in between.

He poured oil from the nearest pot. He struck a match.

The flame went out before it caught.

He tried again. The flame flickered, died. He tried a third time, and the match burned his fingers, and he dropped it into the water, and still nothing caught.

By the time he walked back to the lighthouse, dawn should have been breaking, but the sky was the same bruised gray it had been since sunset. The sun was not rising.

Cora was sitting in her rocking chair, waiting.

"He stopped," she said. "He stopped coming back from the water, and the sun stopped rising, and now it's been three days and the world is getting darker and nobody on the mainland has noticed yet because the bay fog hides everything. But it won't hide it forever."

"What do I do?" Eli asked.

"You light the sun."

"I can't. The flame won't catch."

Cora rocked back and forth. Back and forth. Back and—"

"The sun doesn't want to be lit," she said. "Not anymore. Nobody's been feeding it. Not the real food. Just oil. Oil isn't enough. You know what it needs?"

Eli shook his head.

"Blood," Cora said. "Not much. Just a drop. From every keeper, every morning, for three hundred years. The last one stopped bleeding. So the sun stopped rising. Simple as that."

Eli looked at his hands. They were young hands, unscarred, unburned. He took a pocketknife from his pocket—leftover from his grandmother's kitchen—and pressed the blade against his palm.

The blood fell into the oil. The flame caught. And the sun, weak and sputtering like a candle in a draft, rose exactly one inch above the horizon, then stopped, waiting for whatever came next.

================================================================================