Children of the Sun
​by Drew Townsend

"And it wasn’t long before it wasn’t just them, and others followed them into shadow, hid away with them, spoke with them in a language they had carried with them their entire lives but had only just learnt to speak, between the draws and the sips of whatever it was that was handed to them. Sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter, sometimes neither. Whatever it was it pulled them further away from the sun."

The Sun, Edvard Munch, 1909

For children of the sun, they wore their cheeks paler than most. But where was the sun in those days? They hid themselves from view, bleaching like cupboard-kept chicory, warmed under the incubator light of the arcade where they left peeling shells of themselves all over the geometric pattern of the carpet. People must have found little parts of them each year. Someone would gather them up, those finger-scrunched Haribo wrappers that shone inside with greasy smears of gelatine, those lip-gloss rimmed cans of fizzy juice left to air on the edge of the neon-bright flashing consoles. They would buy whole fish suppers and eat only the chips, toying with the flaking white flesh kept wet by the golden cocoon of batter too sharp for chapped lips. Throwing the remnants in the bin for the seagulls to fight over, never thinking of this as waste, neither the food nor the rubbish nor the hours spent in the dark.

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