The Boy Who Painted the Sunset
When he was eleven years old, Alexander took his first sample of the sunset. He lifted his head to the sky and stared into the floating orb steadily sinking beneath the distant hills. Its golden hue spread into the navy sky like an egg yolk slipping out of its shell, dashing purple and pink and orange across its canvas. Alexander liked to think that the sunset was the world’s way of making up for the long hours of darkness ahead.
Alexander’s father would’ve laughed at this sentiment. He would’ve reminded Alexander that the day could be so much darker than the night. He would’ve proven it.
That was why Alexander kept those thoughts to himself. He sealed his lips and swirled paint together and splashed color across a white canvas, his movements becoming synchronous with the ever-changing shades of the sky.
He was thirteen when the first person noticed his paintings. His seventh-grade art teacher pulled him aside after class, the woman’s overly wide eyes fixed on the canvas in the corner that he’d made his own. “That’s very good,” she informed him.
He leaned away, eyes darting to the cup of coffee she was clutching that he could smell so clearly on her breath. “Thank you.” He turned to leave.
The teacher caught his shoulder. He stilled, tension crawling across his body, but she only asked, “Did you paint that from memory?”
He shrugged. “I guess so. I sit outside a lot. I think that one’s a bunch of different sunsets blended together.” That was what the sunsets did in his mind: they twisted and turned and snaked themselves together, intertwined so tightly he couldn’t tell them apart anymore.
“Sunsets?” The teacher echoed. “I think it resembles dawn more.”
“No,” Alexander replied firmly. “It’s a sunset.” They were all sunsets.
“Well, I suppose there’s no real difference,” the teacher laughed. She’d smiled and sent him on his way with a pat on the back and a final glance at the sunset sample in the corner.
Alexander never forgot that interaction. The world didn’t seem to want him to. Every time it slipped his mind, a new person would be sent his way, blabbering something about talent and perspective and dawn. Every time, Alexander would correct them. It was a sunset, he would tell them. And every time, they would shrug and claim that they’d been close enough.
Alexander didn’t let a lot of things bother him, but that did. Sunset and sunrise were nothing alike. It surprised him that he was the only one able to see that.
He was fifteen when he first considered laying down his brush. It was a dark day, the type of day that reminded him of that ever-present truth about day and night. Alexander didn’t think sunsets made up for the darkness ahead anymore. He thought they were more like apologies for everything that transpired during the hours of light.
It was autumn. Autumn had always been Alexander’s favorite season, as it promised spectacular sunsets. He was sitting on his bed, pencil scratching across paper, when he glanced out his window and caught the first glimpses of orange and pink in the sky. A thrill ran down his spine as he shoved his heavy math textbook aside. He darted downstairs, eased the door open in a practiced way to avoid loud creaking, and collapsed on the porch swing. Alexander tucked his legs beneath him and pulled his easel closer. He blamed the goosebumps crawling across his neck on the chill in the air.
The moment he sat down, he knew this canvas would be a masterpiece. The sky was already swirling with color, the yellow of the sun exploding in a burst of color amidst the magenta and violet shades of the clouds. He worked quickly, wrist flicking across the white canvas, staining it with color and with life. Even after any light hues disappeared from the sky, Alexander continued to work. He painted from memory like that art teacher mentioned two years previously, sunsets from previous nights wriggling their way into that night’s depiction. Time disappeared while Alexander worked, but eventually he sat back and laid down his brush and realized he’d worked well into the night.
He looked at the canvas and smiled. It was worth it. For that one fleeting, joyful moment, it was worth it.
But then the screen door slammed open and a middle-aged man stumbled through, a tall can in one hand, the other already raising to point an accusatory finger. “I went upstairs,” Alexander’s father slurred, “to check on you. Imagine my surprise when all I saw was an open textbook and a half-finished homework assignment.”
Alexander swallowed, glancing first at his painting and then at the sky. Usually, even the navy blue blanket that descended offered some hint of the lingering sunset, but that night, there were no flecks of yellow or white. The sky was black.
“The - the sky,” he stammered. “The colors disappear so fast. I had to capture it.”
“Did you?” his father drawled, turning to the easel sitting before Alexander. “And this is your wonderful creation? The one that you simply had to capture?”
That was the moment Alexander realized the chill in his blood wasn’t from the cold.
“Yes,” he admitted, studying the peeling wooden boards beneath him carefully.
“Hmm,” his father said.
Then he grabbed the easel, turned it to face him, and rammed a fist directly through the center of the canvas.
Alexander gasped and scrambled away, tucking his legs closer to his body. His eyes darted between the ruined masterpiece lying on the rotting planks and the dangerous glint in his father’s eyes.
The man raised his fist again. Alexander flinched, but his father only investigated the redness of his knuckles before letting the hand flop at his side again. He gave his son a disgusted look and said gruffly, “Get up. Go inside. Finish your homework.”
Alexander did so, but not before gently lifting the painting and tucking it under his arm. Ruined or not, it was his.
After that night, Alexander stopped painting sunsets on the porch. He found more creative places: from inside his room, through the window; on the football field of his school when the team wasn’t practicing; most often, he painted from memory, creating different variations of the same sunsets night after night until he finally felt he’d run out of combinations.
When he was seventeen, Alexander painted his next masterpiece. He pushed the doors to his school open, smiling at the light breeze and kiss of sunlight that crossed his face, but he kept his head bent low. He studied the sidewalk as he made his way home, kicking a pebble as he walked. He walked in silence for at least ten minutes before he realized the concrete beneath him had a tinge of orange. He glanced up, and sure enough, the sky was performing for him again.
He sprinted back to the school, ripping through the hallways, ignoring the principal’s shouts of indignation. He made a beeline for the art rooms and grabbed a palette of paint and a brush. When he snatched a blank canvas from off a wooden shelf, a cloud of dust rose up in protest, but Alexander was already back out the door. He ducked behind a large metal door clearly marked NO STUDENTS, the door clicking shut behind him. He tucked the canvas under his armpit and scaled the ladder in the corner of the room, pushing open the trapdoor in the ceiling. He’d heard a group of students talk about this patch of the roof and how to get to it. They’d been discussing how to poison their lungs without getting caught, but Alexander paid attention because of sunsets like these.
He poked his head out to see the sky explode with color. All throughout elementary and middle school, his art teachers had blabbered on about shades that clashed or blended, bad combinations and beautiful contrasts, but as Alexander stared at the sunset, he realized they’d all been wrong. Any colors could be breathtaking next to each other if they were thrown upwards into the sky.
Alexander vaguely remembered the story of Icarus, who’d flown too close to the sun and paid the price - but at that moment, Alexander was certain that if he’d been granted a pair of wings, he would’ve wanted to soar into the sun, too.
He didn’t have an easel, but that didn’t matter. The section of the roof he was standing on had a small ledge of bricks outlining it, probably to prevent someone from falling. Alexander crept towards the edge, propped the canvas up against the brick, and dipped his brush into the paint, not particularly caring what color he got first. The sunset should have faded by then, but it hadn’t yet. Life was never kind enough to freeze a moment in time, but this sunset was. Alexander didn’t take it for granted. He worked just as quickly as he had two years ago on his front porch, but this time, no remembered sunsets creeped their way in. He stared at the sky before him and transferred it to the canvas - every stroke, every gradient, every dash of color.
Once he was done, he stared at his creation, glancing between it and the sky that had turned navy. He hadn’t spent hours on this painting like he had on the one his father destroyed. This canvas transformed in the span of maybe twenty minutes. One was the slow dwindling of a candle; the other was a wildfire. Alexander didn’t think either was better than the other. They were simply different.
“That’s very good.”
Alexander scrambled to a standing position, turning his back on both the sky and his rendition of it. “I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I know I shouldn’t be up here-” He cut off, staring in shock at who he was speaking to.
It was that art teacher from seventh grade. She had new streaks of gray in her hair and a different style - a rainbow sweater pulled around her torso and a floor-length black skirt that rippled slightly in the wind - but it was unmistakably her.
She smiled. “You’ve grown up.”
“Do you work here?” he asked, then flushed red. Of course she worked here; how else would she be standing on the roof of the building?
“I moved up from the middle school last year,” she confirmed. “I expected to see you in one of my classes. I was disappointed when your name wasn’t on my roster.”
“My father doesn’t let me take art,” Alexander confessed. He turned a brighter shade of red, his cheeks rivaling the maroon blotches on the canvas behind him. “I mean, he doesn’t want me to. He doesn’t want it to take up an elective. It makes sense. He wants me to take classes that I’ll actually use.”
The art teacher’s eyebrows rose slightly. She pointed at the canvas on the ground. “It seems to me that art is a part of your life whether your father wants it to be or not.”
Alexander blanched slightly. “Don’t tell him,” he blurted. “I know I shouldn’t be up here. It won’t happen again, I swear.”
“I’m not here to punish you, Alexander.” Her feet remained planted, her arms dangling harmlessly at her sides. “I see the difference between sunrise and sunset now,” she admitted. “You were right. They’re not all that similar.”
“No, they’re not,” Alexander agreed, keeping his voice cautious.
“Sunrise usually has cooler tones,” the teacher elaborated. “And yet it’s still often much lighter than sunset. Sunsets look prettier, but they bring darkness.” She glanced at Alexander. “Art, nature, and literature are all very closely intertwined, you know. They all share the same symbols. Their interpretations of those symbols are what differs.” She squatted down near the edge of the roof, studying Alexander’s canvas. Her canvas, really - he’d stolen it. “Some people think of the sunset as something negative. As an ending. You don’t, do you?”
Alexander weighed his response before replying carefully, “I don’t think of it as something negative. But it’s still an ending.”
“An ending of what?”
He frowned. “The daytime.”
“Not literally,” she clarified. “You’re an artist, Alexander. I know you have a reason for using this symbol. Tell me what it is.”
If it had been a demand, he would’ve lied. It was the soft, curious tone in her voice that made the truth pour from his lips. “Every day is an opportunity for something to go wrong. For something to cause pain or fear. Night means that you got through that setback, whatever it was. It means you survived. Sunset is like…” He studied the sky, eyes flicking from star to star. “It’s like a celebration. An incentive to struggle through whatever is trying to trap you in daytime.”
“An incentive to struggle,” the teacher repeated. She rose from the ground, nodding at Alexander. “That makes sense.”
“Does it?”
“To you, it does. That’s really all that matters.” She went back over to the trapdoor but paused before descending the ladder. “Although I would advise you to try capturing a sunrise at least once. I think you’d be surprised at what you find.”
She disappeared before Alexander could respond.
He followed her path off the roof within an hour, taking his new masterpiece with him, but her words circled a track in his mind for the rest of the night and many hours after that. The very next morning, he set his alarm early and tried to creep outside to peek at the dawn. He paused on the stairs, realizing his father was hunched over at the kitchen table, and retreated back to his room. After a few mornings of the same result, he decided to stop trying.
A week later, his homeroom teacher laid a piece of mail on his desk. Frowning, he carefully pulled apart the envelope and dumped its contents onto his desk. There were two pieces of paper in the envelope. One was a flyer for a local art contest with a college scholarship as the prize. The other was a notecard with four words scrawled in round lettering: AN INCENTIVE TO STRUGGLE.
This felt like a challenge, and for once, Alexander stood ready and willing to accept it.
When he went home that day, he dumped his backpack on the floor and made a beeline for his closet. Shoving old clothes and dusty textbooks aside, he found what he looked for: the masterpiece his father ruined two years ago. He stared at it for a moment, tracing his fingers over the layers of paint and the hole in the center. He tucked it under his arm and headed to the other corner of his room, where the sunset from atop the school roof sat.
Alexander worked quickly that night, so quickly he worried he hadn’t done enough, but one glance at his finished product assured him that wasn’t true.
He’d cut a patch of the school sunset from the center of the painting and stitched it to the masterpiece his father had ruined with a gradient of red, orange, and yellow thread. The colors blended and contrasted and melted into each other until Alexander couldn’t tell where one color ended and another began. From a distance, it looked like a simple painting of one sunset, but as you got closer, you could see the fractures and thread and scars. You could see the places where it was broken and the places where it was starting to heal.
Alexander submitted that broken-yet-healed sunset to the contest the next day and tried to put it out of his mind. He knew he had no chance at winning; he’d never even taken an art class in high school. Still, that art teacher was right: the contest was an incentive to struggle. More than that, it was an incentive to care. It was a spot of light in the midst of the darkness of day.
One year later, Alexander pinned a blue ribbon to a bulletin board he’d hung on the wall of his college dormitory. He stared at it for a moment and allowed himself to smile before pulling up his desk chair in front of his window. He grabbed a nearby easel and paint palette and drew open the blinds, letting light flood the room.
And when he was eighteen years old, Alexander took his first sample of the sunrise.