Winner of the Summer Short Story Contest: Hallie Koontz - Thirty Seconds a Month (Based on Morning Sun, 1952)
As the days got longer so did she: longer-lasting, longer-resisting, longer steady, able now to sit in the patch of sun upon her bed a full three minutes before the disintegration started. Once that time got long enough, from three minutes to five to ten to when she could graduate from counting in minutes altogether, she was convinced that not only would she not burn at all but she might even start sweating, too. That her body would remember how to take excess heat and turn it into moisture, recycle it back into the universe the way it used to. The way living bodies did.
He’d told her it was pointless, but he didn’t know about the three minutes. He didn’t know because he’d say it was nothing, and no amount of showing him how long she could last when it only took one minute for him and their friends to start frying would mean anything, because he’d already said it was impossible and if he said it was impossible that was the fact of it.
But the actual fact of it was this: she was gaining a full second a day, up to thirty seconds a month, by sitting in the sun that streamed through her window until it started to turn her to ash. The thin winter sun was growing into summer now, stretching more and more of its limb-rays across the sky, and she growing and stretching along with it. If she kept this up she could demonstrate the kind of evidence he couldn’t ignore. She could disappear during the day, join the morning joggers she saw through her window, patronize museums and galleries, see things she used to touch and use nestled safely behind layers of light protection while she lived free of treated glass and heavy curtains. She could see what everyone else saw from nine to five, stroll down lively blocks of open stores, sit at little tables on little patios to eat big aggressive brunches. Mimosas and coffee didn’t taste the same at midnight.
She was nearing today’s final seconds, wishing, again, she’d kept her top sheet so she could pull it over her knees. But that was a palliative she’d forced herself to give up back in March, so instead she focused on the coldness of the sheets underneath her, how the heat slept heavy in the air, radiating in points like a pentagram. She tried to breathe those points in like tendrils of smoke, part of some ancient ritual esoteric and exacting. That was an avenue she had researched, of course, before that first day she sat in the daylight just a second too long. It’d be the natural way for her kind to do this sort of thing: a ritual old and terrible that would restore in one fell swoop the ability to walk in the sun.
If she described what she was doing in those terms, she wondered, would he be more likely to believe her? If she described the pentagram of sun-points not as something she imagined but as something she’d conjured—would it hold more weight?
She moved her hands down, from her knees to her shins. They were warm with superficial heat, but it was heat nonetheless, heat that could kill her a second time, heat that was building ceaselessly and setting her blood to burning, ready to boil and combust and devour her entire the way maggots should have done to her corpse the first time.
But she sat. She had just one second left.
Hallie Koontz is a freelance writer and editor in the Chicagoland area. She is a co-founder and co-runner of the Jerboa Lit flash fiction competitions, like pineapple on pizza, and feels in her heart that one day she will fight or befriend a ghost, whichever seems most appropriate at the time.
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