Fiction: Sunshine

By Zary Fekete

The sun setting across the campus mall was too tempting to resist, and Gaspar snapped a few pictures. A strong sense of promise swept over him. He held the mental impossibility in his mind: that this sunset in Budapest was the same as the one falling across his small village on the eastern frontier. His father’s words echoed in his thoughts, The first to college from a family of farmers. I can’t read, and you’re writing poems. Proud of you, boy.  He shouldered his backpack and turned toward the library. A snap of wind caught him just as he entered the double glass doors, and the sudden warmth and settled quiet of the building’s lobby was a pleasant change from the bluster of the outdoors.

He threaded his way through the stacks of shelves until he arrived at his favorite table in the poetry section. The library would still be open for three hours, but because it was a Friday, the building was largely deserted. Most of the students were back in their dorms or already out on the streets, dipping into the weekend social life. Gaspar took out his laptop and the poetry anthology he had been pouring over during the afternoon. He had already picked the poem for the weekend assignment in his dorm room. The trip to the library was for a change of scenery before he started to write.

He thought about the first time he realized what poetry was. The priest in the small village church had read from the Bible one Sunday when he was in elementary school. The voice of the father had echoed, “I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry.” He approached the older man after the service. 

“What was that?” he asked.

“The Book of Proverbs.”

“Was it poetry?”

 The priest thought for a moment. “Something like that,” he said. 

Gaspar looked around him in the quiet library. The poetry books surrounded him on the many shelves. The same words, he thought. Different authors. Different times. But the same humanity. It was as though a channel through time connected them all. The same sunshine.

He opened the poetry book but paused. Footsteps approached. He looked up, and immediately glanced back down at the page with a feeling of guilty pleasure. It was his poetry professor, an elderly man with a wave of white hair, messy in the best of times, and this evening positively in shambles. The man was still wearing a coat, his nose dipped down as he pondered an open book he held in his hands, oblivious to Gaspar’s presence. He sat down at the table next to Gaspar.

Gaspar sat quietly, not quite sure if he ought to stay at the table for fear of disrupting the professor’s reading with his typing. He had made up his mind to move to a different place when the elderly man looked up and noticed him. His wrinkled face broke into a smile while nodding his head at Gaspar’s laptop.

“I guess we both have nothing better to do tonight,” he said, lifting his book. Gaspar squinted so he could read the small writing of the title, Haiku by Arai.

This was the first time the professor had spoken directly to him. The poetry class was fairly large for an upper-level course, over fifty students, and Gaspar had yet not had the chance to meet the professor in person. Most of the class participants were older than Gaspar. Some of them were PhD students, already working on their first or second personal poetry collection. He was only a freshman. He had been able to get in because one of his poems reached the finals in a national high school poetry contest and the judge wrote him a letter of commendation. Normally he would have felt embarrassed and uncertain what to say, but something about the quiet of the library and the special circumstances of their meeting gave him an extra twist of courage.

“Actually, I’m working on the assignment for your class,” Gaspar said, holding up the poetry anthology.

The professor’s eyebrows went up. “Sorry, son,” he said. “I didn’t recognize you.”

“No bother, sir,” Gaspar said. “It’s a big class.”

“It is,” the professor nodded. “Bigger this year than in the past. I should know. I have taught the course for…” he paused while he thought, “…thirty-three years now.”

“Wow,” Gaspar said. “Lots of poems.”

“Yes,” the older man said. “We’ll be covering some Japanese poems next week. That’s why I’m trying to get a jump on it.” He held up the book again.

“I’ve actually never read anything by Arai. Who is he?”

The older man paused, choosing his words. “An obscure hokku writer. Not as famous as Basho, but he could have been. Great stuff here,” the professor said. “And these little pieces are tricky. I understand some. This one has me confused.”

Gaspar leaned back in his chair. “Could you read it, sir?”

“Haven’t I already given you enough work there?” the older man chuckled. “But, yes, gladly.” He nodded a few times while looking down at the page to find his place. “Here it is…

Rusty weeds

More dust on the way

A century of mothers

The professor looked up. “Solid images,” he said. “…but I’m not sure what’s happening.”

Gaspar thought a moment and then said slowly. “It might be…a birthday party?”

The professor sat back in the chair, looking up into the air above him. A moment passed. 

“Go on,” the older man said.

Jasper licked his lips, “The poet could be looking at the old family yard, full of dirty weeds. The extra dust in the air is from the arriving family members traveling down the gravel road, all coming to celebrate the grandmother’s hundredth birthday.”

A slow smile spread across the wrinkled face. The professor leafed back a few pages in the book. “Ah,” he said. “That makes some sense. This is from the poet’s biography: ‘Arai came from an unusually large family for Japanese society of the 19^th century. The ancestral homestead of the family remained a gathering place for the distant relatives year after year.’” The professor looked up. “That’s what is miraculous about haiku,” he said. “What took this biographer several lumpy sentences to say, Arai got across in three lines. And…” he pointed at Gaspar, “…you gathered that in five seconds.”

Gaspar felt words bubbling up within him. “Maybe just a lucky guess,” he said. “But I love it when that happens. I feel like only poetry can do that. It connects distant worlds and thoughts in a couple of seconds.”

A pleasant silence drifted by as they looked at each other.

“Nice work, son,” the professor said. He stood up. “I’ll leave you to it.” He turned but then paused. “I have a special group that meets informally every few weeks to share our personal work. Care to join?”

Gaspar’s heart beat faster. “I’d love to, sir. Thank you!”

The older man nodded and then disappeared among the bookshelves. Gaspar sat quietly for a moment. He reached into his backpack and pulled out his small Bible. He leafed through it and then found the spot he was looking for. Slowly he read the verse to himself.

Then he pulled out his diary and made a new entry: “November 1, 2024. Met my professor. Ecclesiastes 11:7.”

Zary Fekete grew up in Hungary. He has a debut novella (Words on the Page) out with DarkWinter Lit Press and a short story collection (To Accept the Things I Cannot Change: Writing My Way Out of Addiction) out with Creative Texts. He enjoys books, podcasts, and many many many films. Twitter and Instagram: @ZaryFekete