The Long Way Out

The sheets came off the line still holding the day's heat.

"Feel this," Maya said, pressing a folded corner against Soren's arm. "That's sunlight. Trapped in cotton."

"That's warmth," Soren said. "The light already left."

"Eight minutes ago," Maya said. "Ms. Okonkwo said. The sun could blink out right now and we wouldn't know until we'd finished folding."

Soren looked at the sun, which was going down orange behind the water tower. He did not look straight at it. He looked a little to the side of it, the way he'd learned.

"Eight minutes to get here," he said. "But she said something else too. After. When everyone was packing up."

"You wrote it down." Maya wasn't asking.

He pulled the notebook from his back pocket and turned to the last page. The wind tried to take it. He held the corner flat.

"The light we see is eight minutes old getting here," he read. "But before it left the sun, it spent a hundred thousand years getting out."

Maya stopped folding. A pillowcase hung off her hand.

"Getting out of what."

"The sun. From the middle to the edge."

"That's backwards," Maya said. "Light's the fastest thing there is. It crosses the whole solar system in a few hours. It can't take a hundred thousand years to cross one sun. The sun isn't even that big."

"That's what I thought." Soren shook out a towel. "So it can't be flying straight."

Maya draped the pillowcase over the line and left it there. She looked at the water tower without seeing it.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. Think about the middle of the sun. It's packed. Right? Everything crushed together."

"Densest thing you've ever not touched."

"So a bit of light gets made in the core, and it tries to fly out, and it goes one step and hits something."

"Bounces," Soren said.

"Bounces. And now it's going a different direction. Some random direction. Sideways. Backward, even. Toward the middle again."

Soren had stopped folding too. "So it doesn't get absorbed and quit. It gets thrown a new way. Over and over."

"Every single step," Maya said. She picked a sock up off the concrete and held it without folding it. "How far does it get to go before the next bounce?"

"Not far. It's so crowded in there."

"So it's not really traveling out. It's stumbling. Like the crowd after the assembly, when everybody's shoving and you take three steps toward the doors and get pushed two steps back."

Soren laughed, because that was exactly the sixth-grade hallway.

"It took me the whole passing period to cross the gym once," he said. "And the gym is small."

"And you weren't even going backward on purpose."

"Random," Soren said. "That's the word. It goes a random direction each time. So it barely creeps outward even though every step is at the speed of light."

They stood with the half-folded laundry between them and the sun almost gone now.

"A hundred thousand years," Maya said quietly. "Bouncing. Just to get from the core to the surface."

"And then eight minutes to reach us." Soren wrote something, then looked up. "The eight minutes is nothing. The eight minutes is the easy part."

Maya sat down on the upturned bucket by the line. She was doing the thing where she went somewhere and you had to wait.

"Soren," she said. "When did it start."

"When did what start."

"That light. The warm on the sheet. If it took a hundred thousand years to climb out, then the energy in it, the actual push of it, that got made in the core a hundred thousand years ago."

Soren went very still. "A hundred thousand years ago," he said. "There weren't cities. There weren't these buildings. There wasn't writing. People were people, but they were living in caves, hunting, painting on the walls with their hands."

"And the sun made this," Maya said. She pressed the sheet to her cheek. It was cooling now but it was still there. "And it's been trying to get out of its own middle the entire time. The whole time people were figuring out fire and words and everything. It was in there. Bouncing."

"And it finally reached the surface," Soren said, "and flew eight minutes across empty space, and landed on your laundry."

Maya laughed, but it came out shaky.

"It waited a hundred thousand years to be a warm bedsheet on a Tuesday."

Soren looked at the last sliver of the sun going behind the tower. He put his hand up, not to block it, just near it.

"That means the sunlight right now," he said slowly, "the warm we're standing in, the middle of it left the core before there was anybody to stand in it."

"It's older than everybody," Maya said. "Every single person who ever lived is younger than the light landing on us right now."

They stopped talking. There was a lot to not say.

The sun dropped all the way behind the water tower. The rooftop went blue. But the sheet in Maya's hands was still faintly warm, and neither of them wanted to fold it and put it in the basket yet, because the thing making it warm had been on its way here since before anyone had a name.

Maya lifted the sheet and held it open against the last of the light, and the warmth of a hundred-thousand-year climb passed through the cotton and onto her face.