january twenty-seventh;

 

 

Like Icarus, he plummets from the sky, dripping with wax and refuse, feathers sticking to his cheeks, obstructing his view. The air moves around him, cold – winter, maybe? – chaps his lips, stings the roof of his mouth, dries out his throat. Why did he climb all this way just to fall? The sun burnt holes in his vision years ago for how long he’d stand and stare up at it as a boy, pointing and pulling on the sleeves of strangers to look look look.

But children will always have grandiose dreams made of starstuff and hopes that do not obey the laws of science. Gravity did not exist for him when, behind closed eyelids, he could make up journeys across the stars and nestle into the warmth of the sun like a homecoming after a long, tiresome trek.

Those travels ended with spaceships or moon boots, with jetpacks or a friendly, many-eyed space creature - something always gently guiding him back home to solid ground. With his eyes open, he existed as a boy of ten years old, and traveling meant a few things: school, home, mass. His eyes closed he became an adventurer unbound by time, space, duty. But what boy knows anything about duty, about obligation? What boy can see the line drawn between childhood and adulthood and the steep, gaping crevasse that lies between them?

Like Icarus, he built wings from imaginary materials – phoenix feathers, dust from the twinkling face of Mercury, fiery cement from the rivers of Titan, rope woven in the red storm of Jupiter – and fled. In his Mind Workshop he spent days crafting the wings, perfecting their design to be inexplicably aerodynamic. No rockets or ships would ever be able to keep up, would ever be able to move with such precision and skill as he would. Da Vinci would gaze to the heavens in awe and weep for the wonder of it.

Every test flight brought failure until one day, he found it. Wax, left on the workshop doorstep, wrapped in golden, glittering cloth. The wax itself was blue, almost iridescent, warm to the touch – and when he applied it between the seams of phoenix feathers, they hardened beneath the sheen of it.

The final test flight sent him soaring high, high, high into the blue of the sky, into the dark of space to say hello to the moon, to whisper freedom into her ear and show her the glittering creation that carried him up so far to her.

These wings could take him anywhere.

But, like all boys, he never anticipated the Sun’s fury. The comfortable warmth at his back turned fiery, and the sunbeams reached and pried for the glistening diamonds of his new wings. The boy never anticipated the fall, just like Icarus had never expected that the idea of freedom could be so treacherous.

Right. He’s falling. All his past dreams and past plans, all the work carefully planned and crafted, dissolving now beneath the ultra-violet fury of a Sun trying desperately to hold onto one of its own. But how?

Ah. The wax.

A trap. The wax burns new freckles into his skin – a mark, a sign that he tried, and he failed. A cocksure plan to insure he could never make it beyond the moon and her stars, could never turn his back again on the Sun who lived so long under the worship of that boy with bright, wondrous eyes. His eyes a viewfinder into a world the Sun itself could never dream know. Suns, after all, don’t have eyelids.

There never is such a thing as a soft crash landing. He hits the ground with a startling crack, the wings shattering apart at his back, bursting into the glittering dust from which they’d been built. His eyes stay glued shut, or at least until the wax slowly slides down his face, taking with it the last vestiges of phoenix feathers. His side hurts – a stabbing, poking sort of pain just beneath his ribs.

He should crawl back, get help. Somewhere in the distance, he can hear the radio of his Mind Workshop chattering on:

“As a shepherd seeketh out his flock in the day that he is among his sheep that are scattered; so will I seek out my sheep, and will deliver them out of all places where they have been scattered in the cloudy and dark day…”

Another stab at his side, followed closely by a pinch at the top of his thigh. Wax, left over and burning? He should look, he should see, he should –

His eyes fly open.

His sister, two years older, pinches his thigh again and his eyes focus up on her twisted, angry face. He’d fallen asleep. The preacher in the background wails another verse from the pulpit so passionately the boy sees spit forming at the corners of his mouth, spraying onto the wood top he grips with such fervor and belief.

“We must never stray from the flock…”

Wings of wool and cotton won’t work, he nearly says out loud, nearly stands up and screams at the top of his lungs. Wings of paper and ink and cheap bread and sour grape juice mean nothing in a world made of stars and fire and wonders so vast they can’t be written down by the hands of men.

But he is a boy, is he not? And just as the idea strikes him to stand, he sees it. The gaping, wide hole between he and the altar. On one side, the furious man with the fire of the desperate sun in his eyes preaches about light and good, carefully ties the rope of Jupiter’s storm around the congregation and pries their eyes wide open with the blue, beautiful wax. They will never close their eyes and see the bridges they can build, the tunnels they can dig, the wings that will take them far, far from something the boy has no name for.

(Fear. Later, he’ll name it fear.)

The boy sits in his pew, ankles crossed and hands fisted into the worn fabric of his khaki pants, and stares instead at the void – imagining what exists in a place where the eyes cannot truly see. Slowly, he closes his eyes again, ignores the pain in his side and the bite at his thigh.

He jumps.