The Meadow

Let the Sun rise. Ilana lifted her eyes to the sky. From the eleventh floor of the crumbling apartment complex, far above the fallen Sun Kingdom, she could almost touch the clouds. She sat cross-legged on the ledge, just below the serrated slice of concrete wall once carved away by drone strikes, now boarded up with scraps of wood and canvas tarp and rusted nails. Every morning before dawn, she lifted the tarp and looked out. With cockroaches and colored plastic bags and corpses, the coagulation of collapsed sewage lines collected in cesspools. East’s walls were bullet-riddled and dust-caked, slick with the gossamer remains of their gardens. The sun-worshippers walked with bare feet on a clotted crust of cardamom shells and dragon fruit flesh, wading through thickening dreamscape. Ilana drew her knees to her chest, waiting. There. Just beyond the thinnest cirrus of cloud, there was a glimmer of an answer. Soft as embers beneath ashes, droplets of red-gold light pinpricked the horizon line. And then it faded. It always faded. “Beautiful,” she breathed, testing the word on her lips. Like the white-winged moth they’d seen last winter. “Beautiful,” Amma had said, so softly it was barely spoken. “Ilana, look.” Beautiful was a word from another world. Sometimes Amma would tell her stories of Before, when the fruit stalls and the flower stalls overflowed into the streets. Heavy with silk and crystals, the monarchy danced in grand ballrooms with beautiful dripping from their skin like clarified butter. Amma’s words floated through the dark like sailboats on a silver lake, leaving ripples of longing deep inside her. More than food or water, Ilana longed for Before—its fields brimming with sugarcane, sky brimming with Sun. The Sun, which she had never seen. She’d lived her entire life in this room, in darkness. Eight years, four walls, only the two of them. Amma would leave for the factory each morning, returning with army-branded bags of rations and a smoky outside-smell on her skin. Sometimes sugar, folded into small paper parcels, or tomatoes, wrapped carefully in a swath of burlap cloth. And once, on Ilana’s birthday, a mango. Soft and sweet and gold, spun with threads that got stuck between her teeth, juice dribbling down her chin. Every few days Amma would bring home a book, its yellowing pages frosted with dust. Ilana spent her days poring over printed ink-sketches of star-charts and photosynthetic flora and neofelis nebulosa, hovering on the edge of not-quite-understanding hardly anything, learning that the earth revolves around the Sun and the Sun is only one of four hundred billion in our galaxy alone. What would it be like, to live off the light? She imagined herself underwater, encrusted with chlorophyll. With gills and scales, breathing blue-green crystal. But whenever Amma came home, Ilana would drop whatever book she was reading and run into her arms. She was swept onto her hip, with lips pressed firmly to her forehead. “What did you learn today?” Amma would murmur. Some particles move so fast their position can never be pinpointed, but nothing is faster than light not even silence, and white light contains all colors, and white petals recede to indigo, and a mother doe washes her whitetail fawn after birth. In the infrared spectrum we are all glowing, and the honeybees are dying as the earth is warming, and moving clocks tick more slowly than unmoving clocks, and Flora and Fauna cannot exist without each other. Hummingbirds’ hearts beat 1,263 times each minute and the planets circle the Sun in ellipses and the panthera leo has nine lives. Then Amma would set her down, set her to peeling garlic or kneading dough. Ilana’s mother would unwind her waist-length lilac braids, slip out of her overcoat and into a cotton shift. She had a white birthmark the size of a thumbprint on her lower back. She hummed softly to herself as she chopped onions or hung freshly washed sheets. “Amma,” Ilana said. “Did you know that Neptune has forty-two years of summer and forty-two years of winter?” “No, my love, I did not.” At night, they’d sit cross-legged on the floor before bowls of spiced soup with potatoes or lentils, fluffy white rice, flatbread freshly baked on the tandoor. “Amma. Tell me again about the Spirit of the Sun.” “Again?” “Please?” The sun-girl moved closer to her mother, her eyes round. Amma folded her arms across her chest. “Did you finish your beans?” “Yes.” Ilana made a face. “Here,” Amma said, pushing her plate toward her daughter. “Have mine too. I’m not hungry.” “But I don’t like beans.” “No beans, no story.” “Okay,” Ilana grumbled. She begrudgingly swallowed a mouthful of beans. “As above, so below,” Amma said at last, eyes twinkling. All of Amma’s stories began like this. “Long ago, the Spirits of Light were in balance. Back then, the sun-worshippers and the star-gazers lived in peace, and moved freely between the Republic of West and the Kingdom of East. But the Spirit of the Stars watched the Sun from afar, growing restless. He envied her ability to create so easily. Because of her, the fields flowed with fruit and flowers. And the sky … Ilana, it was so blue. Day in and day out, the Spirit of the Sun dazzled the people of earth, sun-worshippers and star-gazers alike. And as they learned to replicate her light, his own light grew faint. “The Spirit of the Stars was filled with spite. More than anything, he wanted to possess a light as bright as the Sun. One night,” she continued, her voice hushed, “he crept into the clouds and snatched the Sun out of the sky. He locked it in a crystal amulet and hung it around his neck.” Ilana swallowed hard, the beans settling as a hard knot in her belly. “The sky grew dark, the clouds swept in, and the balance was broken. In that moment, the Spirit of the Stars realized that he could not exist without the Sun. Now he wanders the earth like a ghost, always cloaked.” Amma gazed at Ilana, her almond-shaped eyes soft. “But someday, someone will steal the Spirit of the Sun back. Someone will break the glass, and all the light will come pouring out. And when the Sun rises, everything will be as it was.” ¤ Now the sun-girl waited. All day, all night, she waited for Amma to come home. After the factory closed down, there were no more fresh tomatoes or parcels of sugar. At first, Amma would go out all day searching for work, returning home with only the furrows in her brow cut deeper. “It’s all right,” she’d say, taking her daughter’s hands in her own. “We’ll try again tomorrow.” Thick soups turned to watery broth. Then came the morning when Ilana woke and there was only water, heated in the cast-iron pot with a pinch of salt, a teaspoon of dry milk. Ilana looked up at her mother, sunken cheeks and sunken eyes, wide. She watched as Amma began to cry. She watched her mother bury her face in her hands, sobs wracking her entire body. “Amma?” Ilana whispered, her heart sinking like a stone. And in that moment, the sun-girl watched as a wash of steely resolve slipped over her mother like armor. At the sound of her daughter’s voice, Amma grew very still. She stood before her as a soldier assigned to the front line and resigned to her fate, standing with a gun strapped to her chest and a love letter in her pocket. Already a ghost, almost. “You know, Ili,” Amma said softly, her voice wavering. “You are all I have. I live for you,” she said. “Only for you.” That night, the sun-mother lined her eyes with kohl and ran the cracked tortoiseshell comb through her hair. With hands that shook, she dabbed three drops of jasmine oil at her throat and each of her wrists. She scooped Ilana into her arms and placed her gently on the bed, kissing the top of her head. “I’ll be back soon.” “No,” Ilana blurted, eyes round in the dusk. “Don’t go.” Amma stopped, pulling her daughter close to her chest. “I have to. For you, my love.” As the door clicked shut, the sun-girl clamped her hands over her ears. Suddenly she could not bear the dark, the cold void beside her. A thousand thoughts rioted inside her, rising up to her throat, choked. Like swallowing stones one by one, trying to absorb a mountain. The true extent of her powerlessness cast its creeping shadow. For all she knew, she knew nothing at all. She did not know how to rewind time. She did not know how to take her Amma away from all this, to return her to her bedtime stories and murmured songs, where she belonged. She did not know how to turn back the silk-black reel, to bring back the dead. To walk with her through cotton fields, gold-leafed air. To give her wild roses, fresh cream, mint leaves crushed between fingers. She was afraid. Too sad, too small, too afraid. As she lay there holding her breath, the vast unknown and everything it contained—like a pooling ink stain—grew ever more infinite. ¤ In the half-light of sunken night, Ilana heard the door open. Soft footsteps padded across stone floor. When Amma slipped into the bed beside her, her smoky smell was tinged sour. Her skin was glazed in a layer of cold sweat. Dried musk and fading jasmine. She was shaking. Without a word, Ilana wrapped her arms tightly around her mother’s slender waist, burrowed her face in the warm hollow of her neck. They slept folded together with hands interlocked, mother and daughter as one. Same in-breath, same out, the way it was before she was born. Until she woke to the smell of semolina frying in oil. Amma went out each night, camouflaged in jasmine and kohl. She would wear only a thin, filmy overcoat, even on the coldest nights. “I’ll be back before the Sun,” she always said. She would return early each morning with potatoes or corn flour or red lentils. They read together during the days, by the hollow light on the moldering balcony. Sometimes Amma told her stories of spirits and devas and wall-builders, men and women who could shape sand and stone with the force of their minds. Taking Ilana’s hand in her own, she would point out the wall that encircled the entirety of the world. Their fingers would trace the indigo shadow along the horizon, just beyond the darkest part of the desert. But sometimes Amma just sat with her hands folded in her lap, gazing alone into the distance. On those days, she wouldn’t dress or eat or speak. She just sat, like a goddess practicing ascetics, sculpted in immense stillness. She would gaze through her daughter with glazed eyes, as if she barely even recognized her. Until the night when the sun-mother left wordlessly and did not return. Three weeks, four walls, one girl, alone. Day by day, the hollow inside her had grown deeper. The sky heavier. The clouds darker. Ilana was a papier-mâché shell of a girl, sitting on the ledge watching faint, fiery threads simmer under the edge of the world. Please. Let the Sun rise. But still the skies remained veiled. She climbed to her feet, swaying like a leaf in the wind. She stood with her arms outstretched, enraptured by the soundless, colorless appel du vide. A thought rose, unbidden. I might die. And it was not an unwelcome thought. Just there, sitting beside her like an old man on a park bench, quietly feeding the birds. But just as she reached out to take his hand, a moth alighted on the wall. It had cream-colored wings, shot through with morpho blue. Ilana froze. As she watched, the moth lifted its wings and tumbled into open air. A delicate k******e embracing the vastness of the void. And just like that, she knew. ¤ There was nothing left for her here. Ilana slipped into her mother’s gray overcoat, belted it at the waist with a frayed bit of rope. She pulled the hood low over her head. With her heartbeat crashing against her ribs, she unlatched the lock. The door drifted open, revealing a long, shadowed hallway. She took a tentative step, blindly groping through the dark. The sun-girl walked with her hands against the walls, skimming cracked plaster. At the end of the hall, the floor cut away abruptly. Gripping a pair of rusted railings, white-knuckled, she began to descend the spiral stairwell. Around and around, deeper and deeper into pitch-blackness, trembling. With every step, she feared the corroded concrete would collapse under her feet. With every step, she feared the world below did not exist at all, that she’d only ever seen it as a mirage.