The Sunset

by Eleanor Ball

The day the sky split open, our windshields frosted over with rainbows. Shooting stars bounced like hail off the rooftops. It was hardly 8:00 a.m., but it felt like evening as the sky bled streaks of purple-gold sunset. 

The sunset spread across the road like watery batter, potholes sloshing with light. It seeped into unfinished basements, soaking the bottoms of boxes stuffed with dusty Easter decorations and VHS tapes labeled Patti’s birthday — 1991. Everything it touched turned a strange silvery-orange that you could only see if you were not trying to see it at all. 

The sunset went anywhere it wanted. It was the new sheriff in town. It had no concept of parcel maps or property lines and would not have respected them if it did. The sunset elbowed its way into the municipal water system, bursting out of washing machines and bathroom sinks. It spun honey-gold stars to dance across downed fence posts as they floated in a sunset sea.

All things considered, it was a public safety disaster. 

School was canceled. We worked from home, stuffing old rags under our doors in the hopes our bedrooms and offices might stay clean. Our children were transfixed in the way you are transfixed watching hurricane footage or apocalypse movies. They burst out of doors, running towards the sunset as fast as they could. Older kids helped babies and toddlers, who too were crawling and stumbling towards the sunset with the fervor of moths hurling themselves into a bonfire. After all day splashing in the roads, they emerged coated in the sunset’s oily sheen, which could only be removed with Dawn dish soap and more patience than any child has ever had. 

We texted each other warnings. 

Look out, or you’ll track in the sunset. 

We keep an orderly house—no sunset in here. 

Don’t touch your eyes, we told our children. Don’t lick your fingers,

or you will taste sugar so sweet it burns a hole straight through you, like a name no one has called you in years.

Eleanor Ball is a librarian and assistant professor at the University of Northern Iowa. Her work appears in Barnstorm, Strange Horizons, Yalobusha Review, and elsewhere, and she edits for fifth wheel press. Come say hi at eleanorball.bsky.social or eleanor-ball.com.