Living by the Sword

I’ve had worse days. I’m driving home, westward bound on the interstate, at six hours and four minutes past noon. The sun is in my eyes and the sky is the same orange of a worn shag carpet from the seventies. We’re past the beautiful part of the sunset and now all that’s left is for a bloated nuclear bomb, a million times more powerful than anything I’ve ever built, to sink below the horizon, before it circles back around to shine in my eyes when I drive back to work tomorrow. 

I wonder what it’d be like to live on the sun. I already know what it’d be like to die there. It’s very fast, and you don’t fry or bake or sear like you might expect. You… become undone, the layers peeling back to bone, the bone blackening, then crumbling into dust, vaporized. That’s what the sun is trying to do to me now, and what it will try to do every day, to and from work, until I retire or one of my bombs falls on me; it is trying to undo me, from ninety-million miles away.

I undid someone today. I turned the key, made sunset start a little too early for him.

I’ve had worse days. If I keep telling myself that, I’ll believe it.