Let’s Paint The Sun Black by Daniel Sheen

Take me back to the endless skies. To the golden fields of our youth that were as wide as a dream. To the noise of a raucous evening, where laughter was the ache that transcended touch, where the small hours of the night shivered down the back of my neck like the breath of a dying God. Because even though I knew the child in you was sick, that you’d been wronged in ways that were unimaginable, I had to believe there were days when you felt deserving of good, that there were times when you knew that you were safe, that you were loved. Do you remember how we’d sit ourselves down on the beach and stare into the deep black silence of the night? Wishing, dreaming, planning our future, the world hushed and quiet, our eyes forever drawn to that one far-away line that divided the water from the sky. And yet later on, as we slept, I’d be engulfed by dreams of burning, of tattered rags and cloth turned to ash, of tiny sparks that jumped between my palms, and in that final moment, just before waking, one of those sparks would escape my grasp and it would grow and it would grow until it became the sun and then the whole sky was on fire and our wings were scorched and we were falling. We were always falling. But when I wake I am flooded with emptiness, and I forget the star-battered face of the boy I used to love, and the forgetting is the color of eggshell blue, rising up around me in soft tender waves. Everything is in-between. Everything is fragile. The smell of gasoline and rust. The clouds flaming red against the glaring sky. And yet when I raise my hand in front of my face, the sun that once burned the whole world is now so small I can block it out with one finger. And I think that makes sense, because now that you’re gone, the world feels far too ordinary to be real. Outside, sirens blare down empty streets. The wildfires are drawing closer, febrile in their newly found ferocity—nothing but smoke for miles, a red moon with a stolen glow. Inside, a garbage-can fire on an empty concrete floor, a funeral pyre of teenage memories. And as the drifting ash of our past lives melts on my tongue, all I can do is lie on the floor and feel weird about how bare it is in this room without you. And then at night, my mind reaches out, blindly trying to measure the distance to safety, and even afterwards, even after waking, it takes time to find my way out of the dream, and so I just lie there, watching how the traces of you linger in the air, how they change shape and slip through my fingers, and then I’m lost in the blur of color drifting across the wall, and I think that perhaps here, at the end of all things, that’s all we are, color and light, vibrations, the echo of an echo, the night breathing its last sigh, the morning sun clasping the world in its arms, your name on the edge of my tongue, again and again and again.

Daniel Sheen is a queer artist and writer. He’s been nominated for the 2023 Pushcart Awards, Longlisted for the 2024 Voyage YA Award, and Longlisted for the 2025 Caledonian First Novel award. He’s currently editing a zine, curating a gallery show, and writing his debut trilogy of novels. Find him at: www.danielsheen.net as well as @DanielSheenUK on Twitter and disaffected.youth on Instagram