If the Sun Exploded, We Wouldn’t Know it for Eight Minutes
The summer we found the body, Mark and I got sunburned every day at the green pool at the back of the apartment complex and flipped his skateboard off the curb in the parking lot. We never smelled the salty air from the beach because we were too far away, but there were always reminders of it. Tourists flowed endlessly through the gas station across the street, catching the state highway that would take them all the way to the white houses of 30A. All summer the dogs barked and laundry dried on the balcony rails. Plants grew bigger with the rain. One porch overlooking the pool turned into a miniature jungle, like the wooded stretch behind the complex. The unit next to it belonged to the super, Jeff, whose daughter Katie we only ever saw in the summer, and who I planned to spend the rest of my life with.
Mark hated her. Two years older than me, he knew everything, and for one thing, she was too flat. He’d balloon his hands in front of his own chest and raise an eyebrow to explain this.
I saw her walking Jeff’s dog, a big pit bull rescue. This was a month after school let out, when the real heat set in. I was alone, bumping down the uneven pavement on Mark’s board.
I said, “Hey.”
She smiled. “Hey.”
I kept it to myself. If I told Mark, he’d just ruin it.
The next day it rained, and I tried to get Mark to go swimming anyway, but he vetoed the idea, which was a new thing he had started, to make his control of our friendship seem like due process. So we stayed inside in his apartment, eating instant mac and cheese and watching spaghetti westerns and daytime reruns of Cosmos. Mark’s parents had so many channels. Their satellite stuck up from the patch of dirt by the stairs like a flower from a plastic planet.
It rained all week, so the body was bloated when we found it on Sunday. We both got cagey waiting for the sun. By Thursday, Mark got bored of me. He picked a fight with me every time I said something until I got fed up and left, which was how he acted anytime he wanted me to leave. So I went home for the first time all week to the dark apartment full of smoke. I sat on the cramped porch and tried to read a book, but got sweaty and gave up and crawled into bed at three and moped in my room until Saturday, eating all the snacks I’d hoarded in my pockets from Mark’s.
Mark dragged me to the woods Sunday morning. Not so much woods, just what we called the stretch of pines trees and undergrowth between the complex and the interstate. The humidity after the rain steamed the whole place up, air so thick you could press on it. Mark still had on church clothes but he’d swapped out his nice shoes for flip-flops. Church was one of those things he did that made me realize him and me were different. “You got to see this,” he kept saying. His eyes were hard and bright.
Afterwards, we hit the pool in our boxers. Katie stepped out on Jeff’s porch and leaned out, talking on the phone. I decided she was there to watch us, not just because the porches get the best reception. Mark splashed me whenever I looked at her.
The thing about the cosmos is that we live in a neighborhood of galaxies, but instead of woods separating them, it’s light years of empty space. The Sombrero Galaxy is the brightest one we can see. It’s twenty-nine million three hundred fifty thousand light years away, which means if it exploded right now, we wouldn’t know about it for twenty-nine million three hundred fifty thousand years. This was what I thought about when I looked at her. That she could dim and I wouldn’t know. She was bright and far away.
Mark and I went out to see the body every day, and every day it looked weirder. It seemed to only exist when we were squatting beside it. Other times, at the pool, or on Mark’s couch, or trying to ollie off the curb, it felt like another thing we made up, like how my mom was an alien, or that the apartment complex just went on forever.
***
We went to the woods first thing one morning, and then peeled the skin off each other’s sunburned backs on the pool deck. Katie was on the porch, the strings of an orange bikini showing under her t-shirt.
I said, “Wouldn’t it be sick if we could just shed it all at once like a snake?”
Mark said, “Don’t be a nerd.” Then, “Your girlfriend’s looking right at you.”
I jerked my head up. Katie’s hair hung in her face, but I felt her eyes.
Mark said, “Don’t look back, retard.”
I ducked my head. “What then?”
“Just chill. Now she knows you know she’s watching.”
“What?”
“Ignore her.”
The lumpy concrete deck cut into my ass through my shorts. Mark and I looked like shaved animals, hair buzzed for the summer, skin flaky and patchy from all the burning and peeling. I peeked at Katie. How did girls get their skin so shiny? I wondered if dark skin ever burned.
Mark punched my leg. “I swear to God, dude.”
“Sorry.”
Mark mimicked me. “Sorry. God. Are you mentally challenged? Don’t look at her. I’m trying to help you.” He rubbed at his neck and little flakes of skin snowed down on his shirt. He said, “Tell you what. I’ll invite her down here.”
“What?”
“You want to talk to her?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Okay, then. Here we go. Don’t fuck it up.” He turned toward the building. I swatted at him. “Katie. Hey, Katie!”
She lifted her head, and I got that feeling when your chest goes numb and your insides sink. She hadn’t been watching us at all. “Mark,” I said. “Stop.”
He yelled, “Katie!”
“No. Stop it. She wasn’t looking.”
Katie pulled her hair behind her shoulder. “What’s up?”
Mark grinned and side-eyed me. “You want to come hang out?”
She shrugged and turned. A breeze kicked in, full of rain-smell, and rustled the jungle of plants on the porch next to her. I thought maybe I was having a heart attack.
I said, “Mark. I told you not to.” He ignored me. I punched him.
He said, “Stop it, dude.” Then his face got real serious. “Don’t tell her about the thing in the woods, okay?”
I never would have, but I said, “Why?”
Mark said, “It’s like, our thing, okay? Just the two of us can know about it.”
“Mark, that’s fucking weird.” He blinked at me. I almost never challenged him.
Katie swung the gate open with her hip. I said, “I’m having a heart attack.”
Katie said, “What?”
I said, “Hi.”
“Hi.”
I felt stupid. She smiled at me the way teachers did at school, because they knew my mom wasn’t really an alien, she was just a bad mom.
I didn’t notice the dog until he was up beside me, licking at my face.
Katie said, “Zeus!” sort of high like she might be freaking out.
I snapped my fingers and he stopped, and when he rolled over I scratched him on the weird baby skin of his belly.
Katie looked relieved. “He likes you.”
“Jeff lets me hang out with him sometimes. Uhm. Your dad, I mean.”
She sat down and stuck her legs in the green water. “I call him Jeff, too.”
“When did they split up?” Mark asked, like he was asking her favorite color.
Katie shrugged. “Awhile ago.” She leaned over and finished peeling a section of skin from my shoulder. “Gross,” she said, but she was laughing.
I wanted to say I loved her, but I managed to turn it into “Thanks,” and then ruined it with, “You’re really tan.”
Mark leaned back on his elbows and groaned.
“Want to know my secret?” Katie said. I nodded like a dope. She flashed me a huge smile. “My mom is Black.” I laughed, even though I had no idea if I was supposed to. She laughed too. “And my dad is Italian. Or Spanish. One of those.”
“You don’t know which?” Mark asked. He craned his neck back so it looked like he didn’t have a head. I saw her wrinkle her nose at him while he wasn’t looking. We both looked crazy, dirty and sunburned, hair too long, shirtless and lumpy and hungry looking. I couldn’t believe she was down here with us.
Katie said, “Y’all just sit around all summer?”
Mark said, “Basically.”
I said, “It’s not so bad.” I thought about the thing Mark and I say about the complex being the whole world, since we hardly ever leave, except for school. Katie was here from another planet.
Zeus pawed at the air when I stopped petting him, so I left my hand on his warm belly.
“It’s pretty lame here.” Mark snapped his head back up. “You got to make your own fun.”
“So, peeling skin?”
I said, “Like snakes.”
Mark gave me a look, but Katie was nodding. She splashed her feet and wet the concrete. She leaned forward, dipped her finger in the water, and started to write her name. It was so hot the water dried up before she could finish a letter. Katie pulled off her t-shirt, revealing the tiniest bikini top I had ever seen, and slipped into the pool. The air was heavy and quiet.
While she was under, Mark said, “How long do you think she’ll ignore your boner?”
***
I spent the night at his apartment as much as I could, and we kept staying up late making up stories about the body. Mark decided it got dumped in the woods, that the guy didn’t die there. Maybe a gang, I said, boring since it was probably true. Maybe an accident, Mark thought, and this was the first place they thought of.
“Maybe someone snapped,” I said, “strangled the guy, and dragged him to the woods to rot.”
After the first few days we couldn’t get close to it anymore. Mark said he smelled it everywhere, even in his own apartment. From a few feet back, the little caved-in part of the face wriggled. The body’s face had completely sunken, the muscles in the legs peeled back, showing white bone.
Katie started swimming with us, sitting on the curb while we skated back and forth. We found out that she helped one of the older tenants hang her laundry, that she liked electronica, and that there were only twenty-seven kids in her grade back home. She laughed when Zeus chased the skateboard. She listened when I talked about the cosmos, how the sun is eight light minutes away, so when we see the sunset, we see it eight minutes after the sun has already risen. “Isn’t that a little sad?” I said. “That we’ve never really seen the sunrise?”
Katie thought for a second. “So if the sun exploded, we wouldn’t know it for eight minutes.”
I blinked at her. “Fuck.”
***
I decided I had to show Katie what we found in the woods. I went to Jeff’s apartment early, before my mom woke up, and sat on the steps by the door until I thought it would be an okay time to knock.
She opened the door before then. She wore a tank top the same brown color as her skin. Her shorts sat just right. She was barefoot. Every time I saw her, I almost died.
“Danny,” she said, like she’d been expecting someone else.
“I want to show you something,” I said, too quickly. I grabbed her hand and it electrocuted me.
“I need shoes.” She slid into a pair of rubber flip-flops waiting outside the door.
The air seemed to draw close around us, hot and sticky down our backs. We passed the pool and I still had her hand in mine, still held it as we picked our way through the woods, sparse trees and pine needles, humidity dripping.
She smelled it before I did. Maybe I was blind to the scent now. She planted her feet. Our arms pulled taut like she was a dog straining a leash. “Danny.”
“No, no, it’s okay,” I said.
“I don’t want to be out here with you.” She shook her hand, but I held tight. “Let go.”
“Katie—”
“I don’t want to be out here with you,” she said again, her voice firm in a practiced way.
I dropped her hand. The smell of the body surrounded us now.
“I don’t want to do anything with you.” she said. “Okay?”
“Katie, what the hell? I’m not doing anything.”
She let out a cruel laugh. “Okay, sure. Like Mark didn’t tell you.”
“Mark?” I said, but I heard her. “Tell me what?” I asked, but I knew already.
Katie’s hands went to her hips. She made a show of rolling her eyes at me. “You’re a nice kid. You’re sweet. You don’t have to listen to guys like, Mark, okay? You get to be better than that.”
“Katie,” I said. I didn’t have a follow up. “Fuck.”
The body was close, right up that way. How close had they been to it when Mark took her out here? Could they smell it the whole time?
She was walking away now, picking through the brown pine needles and dropped branches and ferns and whatever, fingers pinching her nose.
I shoved my hand down my hands and tugged my dick harder and faster than I ever had in the privacy of my bedroom. I leaned against a scraggily pine and came into my hand. I kept the stuff cupped in my palm as I walked back toward the complex, stopped by the pool to dip my hand in, let the shit float off my skin in the dirty water. I caught the body smell on my clothes. I took my shirt off and let that sink in the pool too.
The body rotted away all summer and no one ever came for it.
Kate Arden McMullen (she/her) is the Managing Editor of Hub City Press. She received her MFA in fiction from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Her fiction has appeared in Carve Magazine, The Boiler, Foglifter, The Pinch, and Reckon Review, among other outlets. A Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee, Kate lives in Upstate South Carolina with her partner and a pit bull named Holstein.
