Caught by a Sundog

Just a quick note that this is a horror short.

---

The day obscures so much horror from us.
The sun, its warmth, the radiance that illuminates the path of life holds a brightness so vivid that we fear to not walk within its safety. I can smell the dried leaves of summer; I can see the smile of my brother as we walk along a scrub covered trail searching for another riverbank not recorded by map or by memory.
It could have been any day, any normal day that held cloud within its sky, but the openness of a perfect summer morning beckoned us forward. 
It was so pure, that indifferent blue sky, draping itself across the heavens, a reflected glow of azure totality so coddling of those below, protecting them from the horrors of the infinite. We didn’t see anything amiss, no lurking evil, claw, nor catch, that was set as if to snare us as we set out and left the cut trail. We talked and rambled, stamping down the shoots of the Jurong ranges, we ventured deep into the bush in search for a section of the river that we’d yet to chart; that was us, we always searched.

It’s hard to say how beautiful a river can be. There is simply no majesty greater than the flow of a nameless brook moving as it has always done. For thousands of years the river has eroded a fathomless amount of land by the simple cast of its finger, its winding banks cut deeply into the rock of the mountains around it and tracing it’s path like a saw.
It is a being of no beginning that seeks out the distant shoreline. It forms the veins of Jurong, giving life to an ecosystem of beauty, and as you walk along its bank its history reveals itself to you.
I don’t remember how we became interested in the rivers of our homeland, how we plotted them and sketched their lines as we walked along them. My brother was not as interested in the geography of the bush as I, he was just so at peace within the water. I had never seen someone so calm within nature as he would dive into the water, allowing to tide to direct which direction he should swim. He could spend hours laying in the water, just floating upon the surface of some ambling stream and watching the sky above him.
‘This is bounty,’ he would mutter to himself as he rested, ‘no fewer than ten lifetimes could know a joy such as this.’  

It should be the night that I fear. The time at which shadows become formless and malice will wear a creaking branch as its crown. We turn our sight away from the sun and allow darkness to envelop us; that is the mask of day, the infante void of sky, the nothingness that spans out beyond sight and fills the heaven with the light of ghosts, thousands of years dead. It makes us small, dwarfs us beyond purpose, shows us that all too soon we shall all crumble into dust and our history will be lost, that is the truth of night.

So why is it now the only time at which I feel at ease?
Why is it now, in the darkness of night, that I can bring myself outside and re-join the world? It’s been four years and every day I still see it as his last. Every day his humble smile, the drone of cicadas, that cloudless sky.  

I…   

I have trouble putting this into the right words.

Even after all this time, all these years, the wound is still too fresh for me to accept it. I sometimes think that it’s only been a day and he’ll call me, that he’ll walk into camp and ask when we were going hiking again. How can this have happened? Time and time again I’ve seen that day through clear and sober vision, I’ve seen that morning with a clarity that memory should not be capable of, I can see it as if it were burned into my retina, and forever I am forced to recall his disappearance with crystalline vividity.
I see light upon the water’s surface; I see time become lost.

Everything felt in motion as we left to head down to the riverbank. A mild wind shook the canopy and sent its birds into a panic of chatter and movement; it was only the vast blue above that held no life, a single cruel sun staring down at us like the eye of a dead god.
This wasn’t an adventure, how many times had we walked to the gates of the Jurong? How many times had we waded through the cool sand of its tea-stained waters and ate beneath the overhang of the cliff-line?
I didn’t swim that day.
A cut on my hand and my fears of infection had kept me on the bank and prevented me from the drawing that I once so lived for. I felt useless as the din of the season rung out in a droning pitch, casing my ears to ache and preventing the call of my brother reaching the water’s edge. The sun was so vivid that day, clear enough that you may almost have seen its individual strands, like each particle were an interwoven thread and the day comprised its tapestry.

‘A sundog!’

Shaken from my stupor by the sudden silence I had heard my brother’s call and excited movement in swimming.
A golden reflection, unfixed in its shape, lingered upon the surface of the river, and broiled amongst the churning waters. Even from this distance it was almost too bright to look at, but I could barely look away, it was beautiful, a light contrast of almost sepia hue that seemed to be a pathway into memory. I saw into that light, and I then knew wonder, an ethereal glint glowing upon an unnamed river of the Jurong ranges.

I sprang from my shaded bank and began to climb up the cliff for a better view, unhindered by the pain from my hand I climbed with a tearing adrenaline propelling me forward, desperate to see this anomaly from above, to witness it before it faded.
Looking at the sundog it was as if I were a focused into single point of existence but still held worlds within my very molecules, I had beheld a purity not yet recorded by science, and I felt a great sadness that misfortune had left me unable to draw it.
I had reached the cliff and could see my brother so close to the sundog below, stretching outward as he swam, almost grasping the reflection with his reaching hand. I crouched, impulsively wishing to jump from the edge so that I may reach the glow first but was able to shake the misgivings of jealousy, noticing how silent the day had become.

‘What does it look like?’ I called out hoping for a reply that unveiled the reason for this beacon.

But there was no reply. As the words left me, echoing repeatedly into the canyon, so too did he.
Nothing.
There was nothing in the water.
The dispersing sundog became but peaks upon ripples and then specks upon glass, as I could only hear my own voice.

‘What does it look like?’    

---

J. McCray
2021