My town didn’t have much, but we had sunsets. Tremendous, spectacular sunsets, as if a Hollywood director had orchestrated the whole thing, lighting crews and special effects enlisted night after night, fulfilling notes that read: Bigger — More violet — Cue the eagle!

In their glow we made promises, confessed, forgave one another, believed in each other, saw in the sky proof of our wildest dreams, our mightiest gods. Our sunsets were so remarkable, town dull by comparison, that talk of them coursed like gossip.

Did you see the one last night?

I couldn’t believe it.

I tried to take a picture, but my phone doesn’t do it justice.

You just had to be there. There was no other way.

*

On my first date with another boy, he took me to his favorite sunset spot. Many of us had such a place: a bench angled just so, a perch up on the sandstone bluffs, a gap between trees through which the colors poured like blessings.

“You can’t tell anyone,” he made me promise as his truck turned off the paved road and onto a gravel one, weaving up a dried creek bed that opened to prairie where horses grazed on sparse grasses and sagebrush spiced the air. It wasn’t clear if I was promising not to tell of this spot or that we’d gone there together. I didn’t dare ask. Vowed to keep it, whatever it was, between us.

We arrived at a solitary tree. The shade brought relief for its coolness as much as its disguise. One glance at his truck and a passerby was likely to know not just his name but where he lived, what his father did for work, the right number to call the house later and describe what happened. In our town, privacy was a value dearly held and daily betrayed. If we weren’t talking sunsets, we guessed each other’s secrets by spying and eavesdropping and he-said-she-said.

Unease thickened the air, made us shift in our seats.

Until the sun reached that phase of its daily death when it breaks over the horizon and bursts over clouds the shape of ships, the kind you swear you could walk on. An alchemy took place, turning the light orange then purple then blue. The colors veiled the windshield so that anyone driving past would not notice the two boys inside sitting close, closer still as the sun sent up a final flash of red like the flag of a sinking ship.

When I wasn’t watching the sky, my eyes lingered on his hand next to mine. In our talk of this date, we’d never actually called it a date. Was it possible for two boys to watch a sunset and not give it such a name? To ask was to admit what I wanted, and what I wanted, if not reciprocated, could prove dangerous.

Did he glance at my hand? Did his fingers shift ever so slightly toward mine? Was the red in his cheeks a reflection, or was he just as nervous?

And then it was over. Sunsets always happened that way, done before we could finish what they’d started. It’s what kept us coming back.

As we drove back to town, the wind lapping at my hair, I noted each detail so as not to forget. The feeling that boys described watching sunsets with girls—I’d felt it. I’d felt it, and that was enough to prove wrong a rumor that had been nagging me: that boys who liked boys didn’t get to feel this way.

*

At breakfast the next morning, I asked Dad if he’d seen the sunset, maybe the best all year. A spoonful of cereal halted halfway to his mouth. He looked at me with the same skepticism as when I’d announced recently that I was quitting baseball to audition for the school musical.

“About that time,” he said, rubbing his chin, “I was a mile underground.” With a chuckle that marked the distance between us, he added, “Ain’t no sunsets in a coal mine.”

Dad chewed, swallowed. “Who were you with last night?”

“No one,” I lied.

“I recognize that smile,” he said, donning one himself. “What’s her name?”

Since the baseball thing, his smile had grown sparse. The truth would ruin it. I looked outside where the sun was climbing, climbing. Hopeful, I thought, like maybe this time it wouldn’t fall, like such a change was possible.

___

Derek Maiolo received his MFA from Chatham University, where he was the 2021-2023 Margaret L. Whitford Fellow. His work appears or is forthcoming in High Country News, Witness Magazine, The Denver Post, The Indiana Review, and Split Lip Magazine, among others. He is currently working on a memoir about growing up gay in Colorado coal country.

Artwork by Michael Todd Cohen