🌇 For the Sake of Tomorrow

by Emmie Christie

Dawn pressed his lips to the horizon and Sky blushed like a schoolgirl. All pink and pastel, she twirled her birds up into the winds. “Look,” she said to the annoyed geese, the sleepy robins. “What a handsome morning!”

“We know,” honked the geese. “He comes every day.” They coasted in sluggish circles, then alighted back on their trees. “Every day, Sky.” 

“But he brought these!” Sky opened her palms, and out dashed the clouds, like frisky puppies frolicking across the expanse. “Look at their chubby cheeks.” 

The robins fluttered their wings, preening. “They were there before, in the night. Dawn just tells you they’re there, you know.” 

Sky hmphed. “Well, maybe I like being told things.”

Dawn held out his hand. “Come with me, my love?” 

“To the ends of the Earth,” she said. 

They cavorted together among the foothills of mountains. Sky peered down at the purple shadows of the valleys and pointed out where Dawn should step. When he did, he suffused fresh golden light, leaving footprints of yellow swirling dust motes. He’d take his time inching up a mountain so that Sky would call out in breathless anticipation. “C’mon, c’mon! Go faster!” When he finally burst out, over the crest of the mountaintop, pouring orange and pink and gold into the village nestled below, she clapped her hands and beamed the bluest blue. 

Dawn, however, vanished under the swelter of Midday, his elder brother. Sky puffed and wiped sweat from her brow, and the maturing clouds mimicked her, raining down. “Please,” she said. “Please, can we stop for a minute? I think we left Dawn behind.”

Midday crossed his arms. “We march on. That is our duty. I take you to Evening.” 

They trekked on, and the wind jousted the clouds in the storm, cooling things off. Sky laughed again in the lightness of the cool wind. The robins chirped a sweet refrain, and the geese waddled in the tall grass. The shadows lengthened on the fields and across the plains, ticking off time. Sky made dimpled faces in the reflection of a lake next to her friends, the clouds and even the disgruntled geese. She determined the geese were always disgruntled and it wasn’t her fault. The storm passed, and Midday burned on, scorching through her clouds. Below, humans wiped their brows in the heat of his glare. She called to him, “It’s too hot for them. Can you hide behind some of my clouds?” 

But each time she opened her palms and released a new set of airy, latticed clouds Midday burned through them, steady and relentless. 

Then Midday handed her off to Evening, who greeted her with a bowed, dark head crowned by flowing locks of stars. And Sky remembered.

Sky crossed her arms, and the moon waxed, and the winds stilled. “Hello.” 

Evening’s purple and blue cloak swathed most of Sky, ready to cover her eyes, to blanket her thoughts, to paint over her memories with a broad, velvet brush. In Evening’s hair, pinpricks of far-off Skies shone like polished memoirs, flickering and flaring in the dusk. Sky gripped the gleaming remnants of Midday, of Dawn, and the space of her horizon shuddered. To go with Evening meant erasing her knowledge, for Evening’s very name meant to even out, to smooth, to reset. She could not help being what she was. 

“It’s time to close your eyes,” Evening said. 

“I don’t want to forget this day. So much happened!” 

Evening sighed and the wind sighed along with her, tugging at the ends of her flowing hair like it had played with Sky’s clouds. “But if you do not go with me, Dawn cannot wake you. And tomorrow will never come. That’s what you wanted, right? To see him again?”

She had wanted that. She still wanted that, to blush and let the morning lift her. Oh, how she missed it! 

But . . . forgetting everything? How many times had she done this?

Sky took Evening’s outstretched hand, and the sunset chilled into purple and blue. “To the ends of the Earth,” she whispered. 

Evening shrouded her memories and led her, blind, across an ocean, to the other side of the world. She forgot, for the sake of tomorrow, and for Dawn, waiting to press his lips against her cheek.