Page 10 of The Sun and Her Star

I start to run.

As the very last sliver of sun slips away, it reminds me of Apollo’s question while we’d been walking.

“Do you know why it gets dark?” she asks.

“Huh?” I ask, glancing down at her. She’s weird.

“Why the sun sets, I mean,” she says

“Who cares why the sun sets,” I say. I’m embarrassed that I don’t know.

“The sun doesn’t set,” she corrects me. “It only looks like it does because the earth rotates on an axis.” She mimics the motion with her fingers. “It makes one complete circle around the sun every twenty-four hours. So, as this town turns toward the sun and begins to enter its light, it looks like it’s rising in the east.” She points in the direction of where the high afternoon sun is.

She traces a path westward with her finger.

“And when the town begins to leave the sun’s light and it appears to set in the west.”

I didn’t say anything. But my heart raced with excitement. I loved learning and knowing something that Jeremiah didn’t teach me felt like…a gift.

Our town’s school, that’s run by my father and the other church elders, doesn’t teach anything but the story of creation and simple sums. Everything I know outside of that is what my mother used to teach me before.

She never taught me why the sun set. I used to think like everyone else in Cain’s Weeping that God made the sun drop out of the sky every evening only to return bright and victorious every morning.

But I haven’t believed in God for a long time. At least, not the Godhepreaches about. Not thisGodthat everyone in town is so afraid of.

Not since Ellie died.

Herefused to take her to the doctor.

My mother kneeled in front of him and begged. When Ellie’s body broke out in a rash that made her look like a human strawberry, she tore clumps of her hair out of her head and begged. She screamed, cried, and then finally prayed to God to break the fever that was killing her baby.

Allhe said was, “God’s will shall be done.”

My sister died, gasping for breath in my mother’s arms. Her fever blisters made her unrecognizable. And he had just prayed and thanked God for accepting Ellie into his kingdom.

I’ve never felt anything close to love for that man.

He had been someone to obey. Someone to fear. Someone to avoid.

But that day, I started to hate him.

Andhis god.

He wasn’t my father. But he had been Ellie’s.

But, norealfather would stand by and watch his daughter die in his wife’s arms.

No decent man would tell his already broken wife that her child’s death was punishment for her failure to give him a son.

And nogodworth worshiping would let a child die like that in her mother’s arms if he could save her by simply saying it should be so.

So, God was either not real.

Or he was powerless.

Or he was cruel.

Either way, I washed my hands of him that day.

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