The Sun Returns

The rotor wash hits the station like a heartbeat you'd forgotten how to have. One hundred and seventy-nine days. You count them on the cracked plaster of the ceiling, on the hash marks scored into the desk, on the pages of the logbook beneath your hand — a logbook whose first leaves were torn out long ago by someone, by something, by you.

They come through the door in orange parkas, shouting your name as though it might bring you back from wherever you've been. You let them lift you. You let them wrap you in foil and questions. Are you alone? Were you ever? You don't answer. The pen is still in your fingers.

Outside, a sliver of sun cuts the horizon — thin, pale, miraculous. You close your eyes against it and feel, for the first time in half a year, the weight of your own shadow. Whatever watched you through the dark did not follow you into the light. You think. You hope. You write one final line, and then you let the page go.