The Impact Of Falling
Icarus comes to me broken. All of them do. Feathers plume from his sculpted shoulders, wing-torn, pebbling the hallway like half-hearted offerings to the gods. His head is concave, a dent the shape of the corridor doorknobs. Scars like waves etch across the remains of his cheek.
“You’re late,” I say as I walk him to my office.
“I was held up.” The week’s joke on cue. He gestures to his tattered, bare back. Burns criss-cross the spine, wax crusted to the skin like honey. “Had to walk.”
The room we enter is small, tidy, the space swallowed by a wall-mounted bookshelf and desk chair. Both face a small sofa. He calls it a klinē, I a love seat, but either way he won’t sit. He prefers to stand, to pace the room in a complex rhythm of columns and turns.
“This is the third time.” I take the chair and incline my head to the sign above.
Late or missed appointments without prior warning or cancellation prevent us from providing afterlife health care needs. Upon seven amendments without advance notice, we will be forced to terminate our support..
Icarus shrugs, a dismissive flick of the wrist.
I lean forwards. “You’re not my only client.”
“But I am your favourite.” His smile is boyish. Even half-smeared, a scab of blood daubed on his upper lip, there’s a delicate charm to it. My mouth twitches, picturing the girls who once twirled their peplos around that grin.
“How about we start where we left off?” Our conversations began in the shape of a question mark. He was prone to skittishness, quiet withdrawals, like a fledgling reluctant to leave the nest. I know to tread with caution.
He stops pacing. “Endings are what I like most.”
“We’ve been through this.” I pluck my notebook from the shelf behind me, flick it open. “To close something, first you have to open up.”
His left brow rises, but he is used to this talk now and gives a slight nod.
“There is no legacy in backstory.”
I roll the pen between my fingers. “And is that what you’re interested in?”
The pacing resumes, steps tight and quick-footed. “Don’t we all want to be remembered?”
I ignore the question and glance at the previous session’s notes, as though I haven’t memorised his case. “Your father, then.”
“I thought we were here to talk about me.”
“Tell me, then.”
His recollections are brief, without emotion. I ask why he didn’t listen, didn’t heed the warning, and he tells me it was an error of judgement.
“A mistake,” I say.
“Exactly. A little fun.”
He scuffs dirt from the rug. The fervour of his march is enough to wear holes in the frail cotton.
“You wanted more,” I say. “What you felt is perfectly natural.”
His gaze is pointed. Last week, he told me “Daddy Issues”—fingers raised in air quotes, the tips flaked and sea-bass-bitten—hadn’t been invented then.
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Wasn’t it?”
That gets to him. His sandaled feet are now a labyrinth of step changes. He hunches inward, body the curved ridge of a rib bone. Ready to crack.
“Perhaps part of you wanted to be remembered that way,” I press.
He doesn’t answer. Sometimes, adult hummingbirds push their chicks from the nest, to prove they can fly.
“How did it feel to fall?”
For a moment he is still, a child undone. Then he straightens, laughs—the smirk not of a boy but a man, caught out. “Who said I fell?”
The grin widens. He leans forwards. “Tell me,” he says, “whose name dances from tongue to tongue like a flame, has burned across the centuries. Eclipsed his.” He steps closer. “He built. But I—” His mouth is pressed against my ear. “I flew.”
The words have their own kind of flight. He lingers on them, close to me. The remnants of his wings pulse like veins.
“Good.” I snap the notebook shut. “That’s good. Very good. I think we’re making some real progress here.”
He pulls back. His mouth rests in a slight gape. It is the same realisation as my three o’clock: the box, once opened, cannot be closed. Icarus sinks onto the sofa opposite me.
“Now,” I say, a peace offering. “Why don’t you tell me how it ended?”
He does. How he rose, soared, the way he flew until wax crayoned the sky. How his body became a wave. How the sun was a gold coin in the palm of his hand.
Author: Megan Jones is a reader, writer and linguistics graduate from Yorkshire. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Reflex Fiction, Writers’ Forum, Seaside Gothic, Aôthen Magazine, Bending Genres and elsewhere.
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