Flash Fiction Contest Winner 2025: "The Sun You Cannot See"

The Sun You Cannot See
Nora Jane Branch

You drag your sword along the ground. You should look for the others, for the remaining shreds of the blue flag that is also painted sloppily on your chestplate, but you can’t pull your head up. You’d rather look at your armored boots, rusted, pulling you forward over the field.

The field is disheveled, mostly mud now. Wind sends the scarce yellow grass into a flighty dance, wind you cannot feel through your helmet and chestplate. Your feet bring you to a stop before a body on the ground. One of his legs is stuck in a sickening position, and a single arrow is protruding from his shoulder, in the two inch gap between his chestplate and the armor on his arm. The blue feathers on the end of the arrow are shredded, and they dance with the grass in the invisible wind. Dropping to the ground, you shove your gloved fingers under the chin of his helmet and hurl it away, bringing your face close to his. His eyes are still open, staring blankly into the sun, his pupils black and wide. You’re supposed to close them for him, a parting gift of dignity.

But there is no dignity in this forsaken field. There is no dignity in his twisted leg, in the carrion birds swirling overhead, in the hundreds of bodies that litter the earth as far as the horizon. His dignity died with him. So you let him continue to stare at the sun. It was his choice to gaze upon it in his final moments, as the arrow slowly killed his heart: meeting the center of the sky eye to eye, blinding himself with her indiscriminate rage. His choice, his last choice. Closing his eyes would take that from him. The wind tickles his hair.

How must it feel, to sink into the ground, listening to your own heartbeat echoing in your helmet, surrounded by the anguish of battle? Watching your comrades fall one by one around you, some stepping over your body, assuming you’re dead?

Of course you would stare into the sun. The sounds alone are horrid enough. To glare at the sun is a release from seeing, at least. He was lucky to have died face up. Lucky to have died.

You ache to tear off your own helmet and join him on the ground, to scrape off the blue paint on your chest and the red on his. Instead you stand up. You long for the wind to thread itself into your hair, to make it dance like the grass. Instead you wrench your gaze away from the man, sticky sweat still seeping down your neck. You are glad you are alive but the dead man screams at you to kneel down, talk to him, stay with him, go blind. Instead you step over his body, plodding on over the field, thrusting yourself into the wind you cannot feel, beaten down by the sun you cannot see.