originally published in the Spring 2025 edition of Ploughshares, guest edited by Peggy Shumaker

The Color of the Sun

by Mark Spragg

Mid-morning, mid-June, the sky thick with moisture, blanched milky as a cataract overhead, the horizons blurred, gone vague and unreliable.  The tiered streetscape of apartment, office, and shop windows reflect the wet air back in an overlap of sodden drifts, the heat feeding upon itself as effectively as despair is said to, already over a hundred in the shade, and I stumble and fall to the pavement.

The neck of my right femur snapped as I stepped from the curb.  Or the bone fractured upon impact.

Either/or, the result remains the same.

An old woman lies sprawled on a feverishly hot day at the edge of a downtown intersection.

But the fall does not surprise.

I’ve been expecting to go down hard.  Been wobbly on uneven ground for more than a decade, more recently unsteady on stairs.

It’s what happens to old people.  We buckle and break.  Bones grow porous, finally brittle.  Hearing dims, eyesight clouds, blood sweetens, the pressure spiking, joints ache, teeth yellow.  The list never shortens, lives rarely end without pain, and I’ll be ninety-seven this summer.

 Most of my friends have been dead for years.  Of the few who remain only one has managed to dodge the vacuum of dementia and last week she posted a cancer diagnosis on her Facebook page.

Dire, she said, stage four.  Brain, bones, lungs.

Yesterday, a selfie with her son.  They were poised in front of his Toyota 4Runner, his arm around her, holding her tight against him.  She wrote that he’s volunteered to drive her to a state where she can be legally euthanized. 

A good son, I think, a caring man.  A lucky woman.

But I did not bear or adopt children and would have to hire an Uber to drive me across state lines for my cup of phenobarbital.

The skid of tires on hot asphalt.

The percussive chorus of car horns.

The stink of exhaust clouding the familiar undernotes of my body’s perspiration, and the astringent taste of the polymer resins from the freshly painted crosswalk.

And then the screams of a large animal in pain.

A sound so shattering, but so common, that it owns the ability to transcend species, age, gender.

It could, for instance, be the howls of an old woman who’s fallen and broken a hip?

Or, as easily, the shrieks of a horse who’d got tangled in a barbed-wire gate, front legs cut to the bone, a back hoof sawed nearly free at the hock.

Either/or.

Possibly the tear-choked wails of the thirteen-year-old girl who’d discovered her ruined mare.  A horse she’d fed, ridden, and loved since she was old enough to be lifted onto its back.

A country girl.  A girl raised at the end of a twenty-mile dirt road.  Homeschooled.  Without playmates.  But a capable girl.  A girl who’d been taught to shoulder a rifle, hold her breath, sight along its barrel.

A girl so practiced in personal tragedy that she could survive, if just barely, the spectacle of her mare’s head snapping back, body buckling, the large brown eyes gone empty of light an instant after she’d squeezed the trigger.

The scuff of shoe leather.

A man’s voice speaking the name of the street, the cross-street, repeating them, saying to hurry.  The quick, rectangular flash of his cell as he pockets it.

They said not to move, he says, that you shouldn’t try.

He kneels by my shoulder, and I squint up into the mid-summer sun, find his face afloat against the backdrop of the searing sky, his features shaded, indistinct.

Egg-yolk yellow.

That’s how I will describe the color of the sun if asked to recall the events of this morning.

But more orange than yellow, I will say, like a spot of blood has been stirred into the yolk.

A drop of mare’s blood, I will suggest.

Where does it hurt? the man asks.

I raise a hand and hold it above my pelvis, fingers spread wide, the arm shaking, finally falling to my side.

An ambulance is on the way, he says, and I nod that I understand.

There is the scrape of the loose street-grit against the back of my head as I nod but the astonishment, the novelty, of the pain has plateaued.  Just a profound and throbbing ache from ribcage to thigh, and the beginnings of an all-obscuring confusion as the organs and brain become increasingly oxygen starved.  The result of a body shutting down, I think. 

And yet I am able to feel the tickle of tears against my temples, in my ears.

Is anyone filming this? I ask.

You mean you?  Us? the man asks.

Yes, on their phones.

Of course not.

Ask someone if they would, I tell him, and manage a faint smile.  Think how lucky you’d feel if you were sitting home feeling sorry for yourself and saw a clip of me on TikTok, I say.

The kneeling man laughs, can’t help himself, apologizes for laughing.  His voice soft, steady.

He gently wipes the tears from my cheeks.

A good man, and I, a lucky woman.

I’ve been expecting something like this, I tell him.

That’s me too, he says, I always expect the worst.  I did even when I was a kid.

Her name was May, I tell him.

There is the ambulance’s siren approaching, abruptly shutting off mid-howl, and just the hush of traffic.

The horse I had when I was a girl, I explain.  My dad won her in a poker game May Day, 1932.  I was four.

A half-dozen passersby have gathered.  The peripheries of their bodies, mere smudges against the bright sky, shifting, the verticals of the downtown buildings disorienting, and I blink, and the gamboge-colored sunlight catches in the onlookers’ hair, seeming to set their heads ablaze against the weak strobe of the ambulance’s lights pulsing against the brightness.

Like halos, I think, but hear myself whisper, I don’t believe in God.

That’s me too, the man agrees.

I shudder and fold my arms across my chest in an effort to hug myself still, and the man places a hand on my shoulder reassuringly.

There is the metal complaint of the ambulance doors swinging open, the faint squeal of a loose wheel on a gurney, and the kneeling man holds a hand above my face to shade my eyes.  So, I can see his face when he speaks.

You’re safe now, he says.

He is a handsome man, his face flush with health, vigor, confidence.  But a man so disquietingly young, so blamelessly innocent, that it’s apparent he believes in the possibility of safety, and I close my eyes and settle into the drowsy ease of May and I moving together.  A girl and her bay mare gliding through a stand of aspen on an early autumn day.  The leaves crisp and golden, the sun low, the shafts of sunlight and shadow whispering across our bodies like a caress, a devotion, a comfort, a lament.