Page 1 of Sunset Catchers

Mom, why is the sky turning pink?”

My gaze landed on my mother just in time to see that peculiar expression slipped on her face. All included: a divot between her brows, a slight scrunching of the nose, a tight line made of lips, and a tiny bit of softness in brown eyes.

Mixed feelings. Brought alive onto young flesh.

This expression always conveyed the same dreadful, confused sadness inside my ten-year-old body.

A very big feeling for such a fresh life.

In this instance, I earned this expression from my mother because the guy she was sweet-talking and batting her lashes to looked at me with horror at discovering the girl hanging around the woman he was trying to seduce wasn’t her little sister, but was, in fact, her daughter.

Something spewed right from her womb.

“I don’t know,” she replied dryly. I think it’s a safe bet to assume that she also didn’t care, as she did with most of my questioning that veered on a scale of generic to existential.

“What are we having for dinner” was met with “I’m so tired of always having to cook.”

“Can we go to the zoo?” was answered by, “Why would I want to do that?”

Always leaving the with you on a silent note. Yet I heard it very clearly, every time.

So I did what I always did.

I let it go.

I doubled my effort on the swing until I was flying high. As if I could just let go and be engulfed in this blue and pink expanse.

The next day, still bugged out by this natural phenomenon, I tried again with my teacher.

“Mrs. Brown, why does the sky turn pink sometimes?”

She lifted her namesake colored eyes from the pile of papers she was marking with purple ink toward me.

“Great question! I don’t know why that happens.” Her brows furrowed, vexed. “Maybe you could visit the library to learn about it.”

I bobbed my head and thanked her.

The third time I asked, “Why does the sky turn pink?” it was to the librarian at my school who handed me a book on all things astronomy. Although there were a lot of pictures, there were also a lot of words, and my fledgling brain could not quite grasp the meaning of wavelengths and colors and how fast and far they traveled.

I, myself, had never traveled anywhere; it wasn’t a concept I was familiar with.

When the lunch bell rang, I closed the book harsher than necessary, grumbling, more confused than before and still without a definite answer to my question. A thing, I think, any child would grow up to abhor in the face of most of their questions being ignored and dismissed with long-suffering sighs. The librarian, a middle-aged lady with a blond bob, must’ve sensed my dejection because she stopped me on my way out.

“Did you find an answer to your question?”

I shrugged. “I did. But I don’t understand it.”

She nodded with her mouth arranged in a sympathetic line, but then: a gleam in her pupils. “There’s something else that’s always been said about the sky turning pink. Do you know about it?”

I shook my head left and right vehemently. I didn’t know, but I wanted to, desperately. She beamed at my keen interest. “It is said that when the sky turns pink, the next day will be a good one.”

To this day, every time I thought of this moment, I could’ve sworn there was a ray of sun that shined through the window enlightening the librarian. No matter that I was almost positive, there wasn’t a single window in the library. It gave this ethereal haze to my story, and I quite liked it.

She was a priestess reciting a world-old prophecy in a temple; I was a disciple in dire need of something to believe in.

I grabbed her words and made them mine to guard.

Like when you pay to own a star in the sky.