I wasn't paying much attention. I was inexplicably thirsty, everything was blurry, and my hands were red and black. They didn't start burning until we pulled into hospital parking lot.
While I cried in my hospital bed about how I couldn't feel my fingers, the man who'd touched the Sun waited in the hall. He waited until visiting hours began, and then came in and cracked a few jokes to cheer me up.
So I owed him. I owed it to him to listen to his story all the way through.
"I've touched the Sun, you've touched the Sun, everyone's touched the Sun," he was saying to me as we shared a tray of mediocre food. "Go outside when the sky is clear. The light traveled all that way to keep us warm and feed the plants."
"So, what are you saying?" I asked. "Why's that so important?"
He looked at me and chewed thoughtfully for a moment. "I'm saying that now you know you've touched the Sun. Or rather, the Sun has touched you. That's pretty cool, if you ask me. I'm saying that when you know something good, let others know about it. Lemme ask you something; have your hands hurt much since we've been here talking together?"
I blinked. I looked at my hands and blinked again. They hadn't been searing or scalding or aching or numb. "It's the morphine," I said at last.
My friend laughed. "The drip you're on is practically nothing. You might as well have just taken an Ibuprofen."
He left eventually and I never saw him again. Before he left, he told me that my hands would get better. And they did.
YOU ARE READING
Touch the Sun
General Fiction"I had touched the telephone wires. And not the insulated part, at that." . . After a near-death experience, Jon Paddock decides to stop whiling his life away. Usually, you hear about people who jump on planes and fly to Spain, or people who quit...
