HOLD THE SUN

The collector looked around and saw their empty eyes. They watched him move towards the display pedestal in the center of the room. The pedestal was white with a white lion skull lying on it.

Was the skull the last item he added to his collection? He couldn't remember now.

It was last year when he met his friend from Guatemala who sold him the lion skull. They had coffee in a tiny Italian restaurant hidden in the city, and his friend spoke about his recent trip to Kenya and the people he met there. He said he liked Kenyans and made many friends on this trip. He learned a lot about wild animals he saw in the sun. He talked about yellow grass, and an azure sky that looked like a giant gemstone crushed to a powder.

“How much would I owe you for a lion skull?” the collector asked his friend once they had paid for the coffee.

The man was taken aback by the question and babbled about poaching and protecting endangered species. Finally, he gave in, and the collector handed his friend the money that very evening.

The skull looked good in his collection, and he spent hours every day examining it. Sharp fangs and hollow eye sockets were cold under his fingers.

But it was not enough.

Subtle shadows moved on the walls, but they didn't stir his imagination. The collection longed for his love, but he only attended to the lion skull. The rest bored him, and he even hid a few of the items from the collection in a polished oak cabinet that he hardly ever opened.

Then during one of his usual early morning walks, he met John.

John often went to a bar with his friends and discussed the state of modern politics. He was forty-one, and he had never been married.

The collector invited himself to a bar with John and his friends, and once they settled down with their drinks around the table he studied the shape of John's head. He noticed no visible defects. He approved of the head. The collector drained his glass before another round of drinks arrived and thought about another addition to his collection.

He turned the idea down at first. It was impossible, he told himself. John was tall, strongly build, and many people always lurked around him. But as time went on, the collector became more confident in his capability to take a human life.

For the first time in his life, he thought about committing murder. All that he needed was a perfect murder weapon and a chance to be alone with John.

He contemplated using a kitchen knife on John when the phone buzzed on the table next to him. He picked the phone up and looked at the flashing screen. John was calling him, and the collector frowned as he pushed a green button to answer.

“Hello?” he said into the phone.

John called to ask the collector to help him move.

"I will be there. Tomorrow at ten," said the collector and hung up.

*** 

John had dozens of boxes filled with his father’s books. He held on to the books because he wanted to sell them, but they were old books. No one wanted to buy them.

"I won’t be reading them anyway," said John while they loaded the last of the boxes into a black van he hired for the move. Sweat trickled down the collector's face, and he was annoyed by everything John said. The collector wiped his forehead on the bottom of the T-shirt he wore and looked down at the white fabric covered in yellow stains.

After two hours of exhausting work, they finished with the boxes and got in the van.

“I don’t know what happened to the radio,” said John pushing random buttons on a dashboard. “It doesn’t work anymore.”

The collector shrugged and fastened his seatbelt.

John's new apartment was only a few blocks away, but he drove slowly through the narrow streets of the city that both of them knew well. The collector looked indifferently at the three-story buildings that surrounded them. At last, John pulled over in front of one of the tallest buildings in the area that towered over its smaller neighbors. He got out of the car, and the collector followed him.

They picked up a box each and walked into the building. The apartment was on the sixth floor, but the elevator was broken. They passed its half-open mouth on the third floor. Silver buttons flashed when the collector looked inside the elevator.

They reached the sixth floor, and he followed John into the apartment. Beige walls glowed pleasantly in the evening sun, and the air was warmer here than it was near the ground.

"It looks nice," said John and put his box down. He stepped into the room on their right, and for an instant, the collector couldn't see John at all.

"Check this out," John called from another room, and his head appeared in the doorway for a second.

It was a huge room with a massive window that filled the whole wall. Everything looked too small in the room, and the collector shivered from a sudden realization of what he was about to do. John opened the window to let the breeze in.

"What a view!" he said pointing at the rows of neat houses that spread out on the ground underneath them. The collector looked at them but didn't see anything because of the blinding thoughts that occupied his head.

He lowered his right hand into the pocket of his coat. The wooden handle of the knife was warm to the touch, and he stroked it with his thumb. The action calmed him down.

“Thanks for helping me,” said John. There was a faint echo when he spoke. He left the room abruptly but came back soon with two beer cans. He handed one can to the collector. "They are not cold though."

The collector held the can in his free hand but didn't open it. John leaned on the windowsill and examined the horizon. From time to time he lifted the can to his mouth and took a sip out of it. He talked about different things, but the collector didn't listen to the words.

"Lucy." The name slid into the collector's mind.

Who the hell was Lucy? The collector cocked his head thinking. But it was too late to think about Lucy. He pulled the knife out of his pocket, and the blade sparkled like mercury.

“Ever since she told me about the baby," said John and turned his head toward the collector. He saw the knife in the collector's hand and stepped back until he reached a wall. Beer spilled out of his gaping mouth, ran down his chin and dripped on the floor. The whites of his eyes grew larger. The collector raised the knife and shoved it into John’s chest before the man had time to react.

It was easier than he thought. The blade met no resistance. John waved his hands around as if looking for something to hold on to and sank to the floor. He mouthed a word, but the collector didn't understand what John said. It might have been about Lucy for all he knew. John wheezed heavily and stopped moving. The collector crouched down next to the body and touched the wound. Its edges were still warm, and he felt nauseous thinking about separating the head from the body. He pulled the knife out of John, and blood oozed from the wound. 

“Make it stop,” he whispered. He put the knife on the floor, placed both hands on the wound, and waited. He thought John's chest moved slightly under his fingers.

“Stop!” he shouted at the body as if he expected an answer from John.

The collector picked up the knife and held it to John’s neck. The skin broke easily, but he had trouble pushing the knife further into the flesh. Blood streamed to the floor and quickly filled the space between him and the body.

“Dammit,” the collector said under his breath.

The bone was the hardest to cut. He held John's head with his left hand and used his right knee to hold the rest of the body still.

“There must be an easier way.”

Then he heard a loud crack; the collector let the knife go through the remains of flesh and skin, and the head came loose. The collector thought about Lucy while he held the head. She probably had soft hair and dull steady eyes. The collector stared at the lifeless face in front of him and tried to imagine what John's baby would look like.

A woman screamed in the next apartment, and the collector snapped out of his daydreaming. He looked around in search of plastic bags but couldn't find any in the living room. John probably shoved them in one of the boxes with the kitchen utensils and yellow rubber gloves that he proudly showed him an hour ago. The collector caught a glimpse of a big box in the hall, but it was too far to reach from the room.

With the head still clutched in his hands, the collector turned toward the door. His body twisted, and his abdominal muscles tensed under the T-shirt. He looked down at his feet; the collector saw a splash of red. His feet slid on John's blood, and he collapsed, plunging into the dark sticky mess on the floor. The weight in his hands was wrong, and he peered at them in confusion.

"Two hands and a head," the collector said aloud. He repeated it a few times until it dawned on him that John's head wasn't in his hands anymore. He looked around, but he couldn't see the head anywhere.

There were distant hysterical shouts from outside, but the collector couldn't hear individual words. He scrambled to his feet and rushed to the window. People below looked up and pointed their skewed fingers at him.

In the center of the crowd on the ground, John's head glowed in the sun.

No, the collector said to himself, the head was the sun. It blinded him, and he pushed away from the windowsill and into the room. And he remembered that he held the bleeding sun for a few glorious moments.