To Die or to Fly

He looked at the sun, shining a knowing look of greed and self-hatred, one powerful enough to illuminate a moonless cloudy night sky. His feet, damp with blood, his throat scratched, his stomach empty, and his breaths shallow: he was not going to make it out alive. It seemed quite clear to him, at that moment.

There he lay, dizzily hallucinating on his back, with his lack of will and power to lift a finger. His eyes remained open as he was too pained to close them. He stared at the sun, head first, head on, “I’m ready to take on the world, Father.”

“Oh, I know you are, Son,” his father would have responded if Icarus had propped his lips open and pulled in another troublesome gulp of air. His Father whose fingers were tainted a sweet crimson red was knotting feathers together, but his hands shook, and sweat trickled down his wrists just as his hope.

“I’ll get us out of here, and we will return in glory,” his father said. “The men that fly over oceans.”

Icarus listened and rested, his father tending to him, forcing food and water down his miserable throat. His father, during Icarus’s resting period, went around the island. He scavenged for more feathers during the day and weaved them together at night. 

Icarus got better, to his father’s best wishes. The only thing he wished for though, was to get off this cursed island. “I will never want for anything again,” he told the sea. “I will live in peace and will dedicate myself to others,” he told the wind. “I will be mystified with the little, inconsequential objects of life,” he told the sky. “So I beg you to let me be free of my father’s noble effort put into the greater good.”

“I cry at night, Father, I do all that you have taught me, I pray to Zeus, I pray to Hermes,” his father cuts him off with a sly movement of a thumb. His father decided to take a leap of faith with his wings. He strapped them to his back and jumped from a rock. The wings broke instantly, the feathers coming apart.

He laughed. It was the laugh of an old, sad, desperate man. “The gods will stay out of our tale, that is for certain.”

Icarus, frustrated and annoyed, went back to lying on his back, his hands under his curls, eyes trained up. Up, was all there was to look at. “Up and out.”

His father, an inventive merchant, came up with a solution to the falling feathers. He would pour beeswax over the seams of the wings. He enlisted his son’s hands to hunt the beehive, and Icarus came back to their spot covered with stings, picking out the little brittle needles the bugs left behind.

After weeks of pain and enduring great tortuousness, the wings were ready. The skilled craftsman loaded his son inside the contraption doing the same for himself.

“You listen to me very carefully, Icarus. These wings will get us to the edge of the earth, but dare not go too close to the sun or your wings will melt and you will drown.”

He nods, the taste of freedom already tickling his tongue. They go on top of the cliff looking to the blue ocean, looking to the sun, then the horizon. He weighs the possibility of death against the jail of trapped boredom. Wagers. One wins.

The ocean blue, underneath, so close yet so far – the sun, hot and warm and splendidly bright. The taste of air in his mouth, the feeling of floating in his feet. His father flew past him. “Icarus, lower yourself.”

He did as told, and for an instant, he wanted nothing more, he was at peace, and the little ripples of water smiled eerily. He lingered in a subdued state with a god-like sense of pride. It was truly strange to want nothing more. 

His gaze eventually drifted back to the sun, and he was human once more. He flapped the wings his father had made him, a warning flashing in his mind, “Your wings will melt.”  The sun seemed to dance at the prospect. He seemed to sing. The object of his desires was now this wholesome, out-of-reach object he could never obtain.

His father turned, his fingers still calloused with the days of labor where he would be making the wings Icarus would die of.  

He prayed to the gods and goddesses he knew of, and he shouted for Icarus to get some sense knocked into his thick skull—Hell he even begged the King Minetor for some mercy he didn’t grant.

“Lower yourself, Icarus, my dear boy, please.”

The wax became heavy and the sun got larger. Sweat rolled down his shoeless feet. It was warm, and unbelievably so. The wax dripped too quickly for Icarus to catch his breath. “I will never need for anything else,” he told himself.

Icarus looked at the sun as he fell, wanting something new. He wanted to live. He shone a knowing look of greed and self-hatred, one powerful enough to illuminate a moonless, cloudy night sky he would never see again.