It's the Sun's Fault. Part 5

THE STORY SO FAR IS LOCATED HERE.


"What most don't seem to realize," the exhausted Sun said into the phone, "is that my job never stops. When I'm rising in your east, I'm also setting in someone else's west. Simultaneously, I'm burning my brightest at noon somewhere in the middle."

"I understand ..."

"So when am I supposed to find the time to deal with all of this?"

Bruce Greyson, Esq., sighed into the phone. "You're going to have to make the time. Take a day ..."

"Bruce, I'm the Sun. I can't take a day off. The planet will freeze. An hour here, an hour there, no problem. But one whole day without sunlight and ..."

The lawyer interrupted his client. "There's more, Sun."

The line went quiet for a moment then, "More what?"

Greyson had been wanting to break the news more gently, but empathy isn't something lawyers are great with. So he just said it. "More plaintiffs. More attorneys. More everything. The lawsuit is now class action."

The sky over the Eastern United States flared white for a moment making the usually cool nine AM feel more like one PM in the dead of a Texas summer. Wherever it was high noon, a few birds began smoking mid-flight.

"These people are so set on proving some crazy point that they're willing to destroy the planet," the Sun lamented to himself.

Greyson thought. "Well, given the nature of your, er, you, we can't really have you in a court building for an extended time anyway. There's not a powerful enough sunscreen. So perhaps you can attend via satellite?"

The two spoke for another five minutes before the Sun had to leave so he could work.

As he traveled west across the sky, he noticed a little girl staring up at him. Her mouth appeared to be moving.

"Are you addressing me?" he asked the child.

"My mommy says you're in trouble," she shouted upwards in a teeny little child's voice.

As he had been doing more and more often, the Sun traveled down in his human form, leaving his fiery chariot up in the sky without a driver. He approached the wide-eyed child. She was sitting in the grass amongst dolls and other human toys.

"Some people aren't happy with me right now."

"Why?" she innocently asked.

"Because I can make their skin red. And their eyes hurt."

"Oh." The child looked down at the grass as it leaned towards the Sun, craving his light.

"I'm not mad at you. You tell me when to eat breakfast and when to eat dinner." She looked up. "I'm Chloe."

The Sun smiled. "Thank you, Chloe. It's good to have someone on my side." He waved to her and rose back into the sky. He took his place in his fiery chariot.

From far away, he heard a small, angelic little voice, "Besides, all of those mean people are dumb asses. That's what my daddy says."