Stale Light

• Caitlin Sharkey, Grade 12, Shenton College
• Short Story
• 2017

Excellence Award in the 'Spread The Word 2017' competition

For years, all that the sun had provided us with had been ideals. The inevitability of a returning light after darkness. The nurture of something far greater than us, all reliable and sure and steady.
It left us not because we weren’t deserving of it, although admittedly we weren’t. It simply stopped because it couldn’t care for the insignificance of us humans. To it, we were nothing. Its very non-existence proved to show that even reliable things weren’t to be trusted.
Unsurprisingly, it was theorised by scientists that maybe it was just too old. A star at the end of its life where we just didn’t get to witness the supernova. Perhaps humans had damaged the earth too much, for too long, and the disappearance of the sun was a by-product of the havoc we’d wreaked on the planet, a damage far too great for a fragile solar system.
Not that it mattered, of course. We didn’t know how or why the sun left, but we didn’t really care either.
It was no longer needed by us anyway.
Now we have artificial lights. There are children who have never known what it was like to see a sun rise in the morning, for it to get wrapped up by the clouds during winter storms, or to be hidden by the shadow of the moon in the day during a solar eclipse. Instead, man-created light floods the room where a mother holds her baby. It bathes the faces of the dead where a girl mourns the loss of her grandfather. It illuminates the way when a brother is forced to fight against another, when an angry world can’t agree on who’s at fault.
One day, the sun came back to us.
It felt like nostalgia, and warmth, but most of all it was full of forgetfulness. The forgotten feelings of how it used to warm our skin and bring us light each morning like steady clockwork. We had lived in a kind of natural darkness for too long, that when the light finally wrapped its rays around us, it could only be described as stale. The sun, having lost its value, had as such been efficiently replaced, the way fruit was left to rot when we didn’t feel like using it and then immediately interchanged with canned fruit - the kind boasting a shelf life of not days, but years.
We had learnt our lesson. Light no longer served any purpose to humans anymore.
Light itself in its almighty glory had been dwindled down to a human concept, and God knew we weren’t merely humans anymore. As it turned out, God was a human concept as well.
We complained that the light was stale but when it came down to it, so were we.