#1. Young Gun Sun

In its prime, and so bright and yellow it was almost green, the sun flexed its youthful muscles, spewing out mighty pillars of gas into the void; pulsing tsunamis of electromagnetic waves towards its neighbours as if there were cosmic surfers to ride them; telling its audience stories about chariots and that it would live forever. What were a few billion years anyway? In fact, what even was a year?

It spat thunderous flares no ears could hear, played hide and seek behind the moon, and thought death was forever away, until one day it grew too big for its boots.

#2. Red Dragon

In its mightiness, its love of its own narrative, its flaming red fire-breathing dragonness, the sun growled and hissed and engendered fear in its audience with its pareidolic roiling. But then it grew tired. It had told stories about gods and men with wax wings when it was bright and young, but now it curled old desultory fingers around gaseous nothings and let them go. When it finally breathed in weightily to sigh itself away, the gigantic heave of its inhalation expanded the heliosphere so far that it burned away its audience, leaving it alone and lost in the echoing emptiness.

#3. White Nova

This was odd.

In its youth, the sun had felt its own powerful vibrancy and the blinding heat of perpetuity, followed by fatigue, lethargy, a sense of relinquishment and resignation.

But now this.

This thundering flood of sharp-toothed energetic particles. This frozen boiling pot of tumultuous chains of reactive elemental bits and bob’s your uncle jostling with snarky quarks.

This belly ache.

This two-curries-too-many solar wind.

Then, with only several millennia warning and like a wizard erupting from the guise of a frog, the sun burst out of its fat red dead Santa suit, a new shining, silver and blue star of the knight that threw whole worlds into the cosmic recycling bin.

#4. Red Dwarf [not that one]

The sun looked around and where the audience had been there was just blackness.

Where the buzzes and chirps of radio waves and TV signals and satellites and stuttering rockets once populated the vacuum, there was silence.

Had they left?

Did they leave before ..?

The sun didn’t want to think about before. The sun preferred to think about Carry on Up the Khyber and Casualty and the Generation Game and Strictly and Dr Who and Star Trek and the Brian Coxes and the internet and spam and memes and how, with one twitch of an EMP, it could all be cut off.

And because the sun had the sensibilities of a ten-year-old boy, for a laugh, it had blasted its neighbours with EMPs and gone off to snigger behind the moon, feeling clever.

Sorry, not sorry.

Until now.

Where were they all?

#5. Billions of Suns

The billions of suns began the rounds of goodbyes. First to the distant galaxies slowly disappearing over an unknowable horizon, then to their neighbour galaxies which were like second cousins, and on to their local down-the-road galaxies, their co-stars in an endless hubble bubble soap opera.

Finally came the planets and moons of their own systems, if they had them; once the irritating fleas on their backs that couldn’t be dislodged even with solar storms and phantasmagorical horror stories, but now their only friends in the looming dark.

Doppler had it right. Red was for drifting apart and space was full of red tearful eyes, and red goodbye faces streaked with red trails of never agains.

Soon the lights would go out, along with the sounds of and smells and hopes of life; all the stuff that wasn’t matter but that mattered, stretched away into nothingness. Darkness. Pitch black.

Hang on, what’s that?

BANG

The text didn’t make it to the final video as it was too intrusive, but it informed the narrative which, without it, made possible a different tone.

Narrative piece, A Sun’s Lament, (c) suzanne conboy-hill 2023.