Sunlight by King Seth

Author:King, Seth [King, Seth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

Some thirty years later, Fred Ecklund lay on his hospital-style bed that had been installed in his bedroom, stunned to silence by the news as he rubbed his feet together. Today, marriage between those of the same sex was legal , federally legal, and it kept making Fred do a double take at the television again and again. Oh, the world was so different now – many of the young people he read about in the paper were even proud of being homosexual. Proud ! To go from being pushed out of society in Fred’s youth, being hidden and marginalized and murdered, to being embraced in this way – how could it all happen in one human lifetime? Fred knew his brain was old and decaying, but still it did not make any sense to him. If anything it scared him, because he’d driven through enough tiny angry towns to know that millions of people out there wouldn’t like this at all. What would their revenge be? What was coming on the orange sunset?

Fred coughed, a deep hacking thing that burned him from his stomach to his teeth. He knew he would be dead soon – he hadn’t even expected to live this long at all, actually – and what would be left behind of him then? His little dog would sniff and then wonder when she would be served dinner that night. He didn’t have any friends left, as they’d all died or lost contact. His sisters were dead, too. His two worried nieces had stopped calling, and now they weren’t so worried anymore. In fact, they rarely mentioned that they had an uncle at all. It was just Fred now. Fred, and the memories of Timucuan…

He knew how he’d always come off to everyone, of course. Knew it and hated it. He knew he was the Sad Brother and then the Sad Uncle and then even the Sad Great-Uncle. He felt their pity every minute, so he’d stopped coming around. He couldn’t bear to face it anymore. His last friend had been his mother, actually. Fred’s mother had come to his house every single week for decades to eat a TV dinner in silence with her son – she worried about him, and he was lonely, and she knew he spent his life alone, looking off at things and remembering. She was the only one who never stared, who never asked anything of him.

Well, besides that one time. Once, Fred had almost gasped out his entire truth to his mother. She’d come over Friday at six PM, just as she always did, but it was the anniversary of her husband’s death, and she was listless.

“You know,” she said inscrutably after a jeweler’s tacky engagement ring commercial played on the television. Harry had been dead for three years, and every day was still a new kind of agony. It hurt to sleep, it hurt to be alive. He missed his friend so much – in fact, he would’ve gladly

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