Blind burning broken blisters blood FATHER

He wakes up to find he has wet the bed again. He is painfully hard. He has surely been screaming, but from what he's been told also laughing, whooping with elation. This is why he lives alone.

—

It is almost sunrise. He can’t get back to sleep, so he rises and goes out to wash his sheets in the river. Every week around this time a little pity parade from the village brings some food around to his cottage, which they call a shack, or a hovel sometimes. If they saw, the sheets would just give them one more reason to never leave him alone. To never stop staring at his eye. To never stop with that revolted look of pity when they speak to him and he doesn’t know what to say. On the rare occasion he pleases them, that’s almost as bad as when he doesn’t.

He is careful not to stand too close to the river as he rinses the sheets; he gets only his hands wet. Water unravels. Water undoes. Casts feathers adrift on the salt spray, bloody foam staining them red then dragging them under. He can see it in the piss stains dissolving into nothing, in the pruny texture dessicating his fingers. Above, the sun is like a spotlight. Even when he closes his eyes; he doesn’t have to look at it to know it’s there. He can almost feel a wisp of smoke curling up from his skin, as if there were a coal still smoldering in one of his scars.

He looks straight up and wills his eye to stay open, letting blades of light right into his pupil until it’s shrunk into nothing and he’s seeing spots. He imagines the sunbeams burning a hole in his head through his dead socket, the fire licking his hair and making it dance, searing ash sticky crisp smoke coming F—

He snaps his head down. Waits for his vision to clear, but when it does it settles on his yellowed rags floating in the river, and he turns away in disgust. He thinks he can hear the villagers back by his cottage; they’ll start yelling for him if they can’t find him and they won’t stop until they do. It’s all for his own good. He breathes until that’s all his mind is, a thing that breathes. He gets a head rush when he stands up to go home, and this one is so bad he almost faints and has to catch himself on the muddy riverbank. Now he has to steel himself to wash his hands.

—

Long ago, he lived in a tower with sun streaming through the windows, and he would sit on the sill and read books or eat apples and admire the play of light on water below. Out of the corner of his eye, almost outside of his vision from the window’s vantage, the labyrinth crouched empty outside the palace like a dead spider. He remembered playing outside it once as a child, with a little girl dressed in royal robes, but before long his father came running, running like he’d never seen his bookish father run--he grabbed both their hands and pulled, and two palace guards came for the girl, and the whole way home his father kept looking over his shoulder like the labyrinth would reach out a long spiraling stone passage and pull them into the darkness.

But that was long ago, before they had to move. Now, long ago, he would sit at the windowsill and wonder what was happening to the girl without him. They had played king and queen, but he had never really wanted to marry a girl so he tried to play a hero going on a quest or something instead of a stupid love story, but then she just said he should be Perseus and she would be Andromeda. She hugged her little ball of yarn to her chest and pouted until he said yes, but then they later played Apollo and Artemis and got along much better as brother and sister.

He had no sister now, no brother either; just his father’s constant talking from over where he was working on his next invention, and the calls of seagulls on the wind. Sometimes he thought of the toy bird he used to fly around the village at home and pretended he was that bird, about to leave the tower to play out in the clouds all day with a whole flock of birds as his family. And sometimes, though he’d draw back into the tower and pretend he hadn’t done it, though it would feel too real even though it was just in his head, sometimes he would look down at the ocean and imagine jumping, all the way down from the tower window, jumping into the ocean and releasing all that was salty in him to the depths.

—

They found him at low tide with the other dead things of the sea, salt in bright bloody wounds seaweed drifting into his dead eye no blinking. An oyster shelled. He still feels like there’s sand under his skin, inside his scars. The healer told him she had to dig weevils out of his eye socket, like getting the last bits of ointment out of a jar. She told him one day she woke up and they were banging on her door, saying Daedalus’s son had washed up from the sea, spat up like Minos vomited him back from Crete. But no Daedalus. “He was a bitter old creature, but the man was the only other person in town who read books, so I s’pose I miss him. Where is he, anyway?”

He later learned that the village healer is assumed to be a witch by most of the town, but that it doesn’t stop them from begging her to help when they cough up blood, or when their children get snarled in their own umbilical cords. He also later learned that his father had been executed back on Crete for attempted escape. Minos had him dropped from the tower, sneering “Why don’t you fly away?” as his guards dangled him from the window. While he has no doubt that his father was scheming right until the end, it would seem his inventor’s mind met its match in the rocks below.

“They say you must have been sailing to safety on a stolen ship, when you hit a storm. Must have been lightning that night, if I’m reading those scars right. If only you had a lightning glass on your mast, it would never have happened.” But who would he be if it had never happened? A stupid boy with two eyes and no wings. A boy who played heroes with his friend right by the entrance to the labyrinth. When the witch left to get more wood for the fire, he stuck his hand out and laid it on the coals. At first he felt nothing, and then he felt pain, and then he felt nothing again but he could tell bits of skin were falling off, snake shedding apple peeling crisp white bone underneath but then it cracks and the marrow spills out like a melting eyeball FATHER

When the healer came back she found him screaming, but she had to drag his hand out of the flames herself. She said she had never seen anything like it. Later, once he’s set up his own shack, even farther away from the village than the healer’s, he never lights a fire. He can’t bear to kill another creature either, so he mostly eats nuts and olives, fruit and root vegetables. Sometimes eating makes him think of fire devouring a log, a leaf, a baby bird, and he can’t eat at all. He loses weight. The village elders tell him he looks good. Glad to see you’re taking care of yourself. Maybe you’d like to come into town, train with the other boys your age? Might get you out of this—er, get you out of the house.

—

He returns home to find the usual concerned citizens. Robed in fine cloth, slaves carrying their cargo, chaste women at home. They have taken an interest. They come bearing gifts. They give him things, then ask for things in return. Things like obedience, fealty, religious observance. The food isn’t really a gift then, so much as a reminder that they can kill him if they want to and have chosen to let him live. They never bring him enough for his belly to be full, but they do bring enough for him to shrug and accept it.

They have a responsibility, as they have told him many times, not only to be virtuous themselves but to ensure all in their village are virtuous, so that the village can be virtuous and therefore make its people virtuous, so they can make the village virtuous. Virtue is moderation, because moderation is beauty, and beauty is virtue. Those who do not attend village festivals, who are in the habit of spending their time staring at the clouds or sifting through dirt as if they’ll find a lost eye that way, who seem to have no intention of marrying and producing children to fight in the next war, are not being virtuous or moderate. What is moderate is what is normal, so what is normal must be virtuous.

Long ago, he knew them growing up. Some of the older ones came to the house for dinner with their fathers, some of them hung around the village square chasing girls while he and his friends were trading bits of their lunch on the gymnasium steps. Now they invite him to their parties, but he mostly just stands around and doesn’t know what to do, often staring into the torches alone for long periods of time. They call him Skoros, or Moth, to tease him. He isn’t allowed to tease them back.

Long ago they knew his father, and they knew the little blond boy who ran around with a toy bird pretending it was flying. Now they still have his father’s catapults, his father’s iron horses, but he doubts he would be allowed to roam around the village for long if he retraced those youthful steps. When he lingers without purpose a couple young boys who the elders have deputized, boys no older than he but with no scars at all, not even one, come up and inquire pointedly as to what he’s up to, where he’s going, when he’s going there. These moments would probably be even more tense if he was also pretending to make a toy bird fly, like some idiot child who has never fallen farther than from a tree. He pictures that toy bird consumed with fire feathers ripped apart by flame like an animal eating it FATHER

He doesn’t know how long he’s just been silent, or what face he made that was wrong, but the sage smiles are gone. They are looking at him like a rabid dog, or a simpleton child. One man has unconsciously brought his hand to the dagger in his robes. There they go, back to the village to whisper about him. This might not be good.

—

Long ago, his father had an idea. This wasn’t unusual. His father had many ideas, he had them all the time; he was known across the Aegean for having the most great and terrible ideas. But this one was different.

After they moved to the tower, after it had been years since he played with the girl with the yarn ball and even more years since he ran around town with his toy bird, his father was angry. He was brilliant and he was bold and he was ruthlessly hardworking, but he was angry above all else; he would create marvelous inventions, but he would douse them all in bile.

All day his hands and mouth were working to create things ever more twisted, weapons that Minos took with glee to feed his wars with Persia, with Sparta, with Thebes. He didn’t ask his father why he was helping the king; he sensed that would earn him a slap, or a withering look that would be just as bad. Instead he handed his father screws and hammers and bits of leather or metal, and sometimes said “yes” and “you’re right.”

Now his father was working on something else, and whenever Minos’s guards came by the workshop they hid it under their bed, and when he didn’t move fast enough and nearly got caught his ears rang until he went to bed that night. He would sit at the window while Daedalus played with strings and wax, and look off to where their village would be across the sea from Crete, until his father shouted at him to come help with the pinion feathers.

His father was getting busier and busier, which meant he didn’t have time for as many slaps, while the boy spent those days making up stories about all the different birds in the family outside his window. He even made up another family of birds that lived in a royal tower near the room of a little girl who played with yarn, and sometimes all the characters got together and went on adventures.

But it was not always like that. Later, when he dreams, sometimes he is screaming and curling up in a black ribbon, but sometimes he and his father are looking out the window at sea and sky, blue and blue, the two of them together, with common purpose that would let them conquer realms lesser mortals never even knew were there. One hand on his son’s shoulder, the other gesticulating wildly at clouds, how they would float free in that glittering kingdom and people would look up in adulation, unimaginable power like Zeus’s lightning bolt it will smite sizzle worthless unfaithful scorch them all rubble ruin ashes vermin who dare to FATHER

He wakes up, smells ozone and ash. And piss.

—

The concerned citizens are there again the next day, though they haven’t brought food. This time they have swords strapped to their belts, which doesn’t mean they’re going to use the swords. It just means they’re going to use the fact that they can kill him with the swords if they want, that is if they have to, if it’s for the best, if he’s brought it on himself. He hasn’t had time to wash the sheets. He doesn’t invite them in. He prays they don’t invite themselves.

As he knows, they have been very generous about supporting him since the boating accident, something about his father, a great man, contributions to the community, something something war coming, a long story about the people in the next village over and the people in this village and he has no idea where it’s going, but something something everyone has to help with the war effort. The main point of the lecture is this: the food will stop, and he will not be welcome within one hundred miles of the village, unless he finds a way to make himself useful. As it is, you just aren’t pulling your weight. Soon we won’t have as much to spare. We’ve given you more than enough time.

—

Long ago, he used to watch the seagulls reveling around the tower. Now, he had to use bits of his lunch to bring them closer, so his father could trap them in a snare of his own design. “Dunce! It’s like you want them to get away!” He looked at the shapes in the clouds while Daedalus stripped the gulls of their choicest wing feathers, but he still saw his father throw them like stones out the window when he was finished. He didn’t tell his father that he knew all of their names, and their favorite kinds of fish, and what scraps the princess gave them every day in the next tower over, probably.

While he watched the remaining birds circle a safe distance from their tower, his father sewed the feathers together carefully as a fishwife mending nets. Minos was still a generous master, and even though Daedalus rarely used cloth he had a full wall of the choicest canvases and string, should he choose to use it. But no yarn.

When they came to this tower room, points of spears in the smalls of their backs, they found in the center of the room a whole pile of the richest yarns of Crete, soft and neatly wrapped and made of all the brightest colors. A note from Minos, saying “try to find your way out of here with this.” His father stood still for a moment, then threw every skein out the window, then kicked at his worktable and his bed and threw books on the floor, where they lay helpless like birds with their flight feathers cut. Even now in his earthen hut, the boy remembers waiting in the corner by the door for it to be over.

All because of her. All because of the royal girl with the royal robes who thought her royal father would never find out who had helped her. She snuck into their chambers at night, told them this man who would fight the Minotaur, this prince of Thebes, he was different, she loved him, she couldn’t let his father’s creation and her father’s monster kill him. She had to save him, and to do it she needed the most famed inventor in all of Greece, creator of Ares’s favorite toys and Hephaestus’s most cherished marvels, master of the Minotaur and spinner of stone spiderwebs.

His father let her finish singing his praises. Then he said no. The secrets of the labyrinth were in his head, he said, and they would not come out. Go back to your father, girl, and we’ll pretend you never came here asking me for treason. And she raged and pleaded, sobbing like only a rich girl who learned that’s how you get what you want can do, but finally she left, pushing a new invention off the table, one that would have been a spyglass that showed the world of ants and specks of dust up close. Daedalus loved playing with glass and mirrors; he had a particular talent for warping the world to any perspective he wished. The inventor sighed, thrust a broom into his son’s hand, and went back to his workshop to grind new lenses all night.

But the blonde boy, the boy whose toy bird the inventor had thrown away when they came to Crete, saying the son of the greatest craftsman in the world shouldn’t play with such childish things, this boy was there when the labyrinth was built. He saw the walls raised, he saw the twisting maps his father drew. And he wouldn’t even have had to know the way through, to know that all you have to do to solve a maze is keep track of where you’ve gone and then try everywhere else. You see, he is his father’s son.

So the boy went to the royal chambers with a bag of honeyed dates and said he had a gift for the princess, and the guards nudged each other and bet on his chances with her, but in her royal room he just opened the bag and pulled out not dates but a ball of yarn, like the one she used to hug to her chest like a best friend. Not all labyrinths are made of stone, but most can be navigated if you know where you’ve been and you keep moving forward. When he heard she had escaped with the handsome young prince from Thebes, he was happy for her. But he had no prince, so when Minos’s wrath came down on his father, all he could do was watch Daedalus rage at the false accusations. Through the beatings, the tower, the flight, he never told his father what he did.

“Come with us.” But he had no prince. “We can escape together.” But his father would find him, he knew he would, in Thebes or Athens or Alexandria. “You know your father is mad.” But not all labyrinths are made of stone.

—

The days at the healer’s hut were peaceful, once he could sit up. For a while each day, he would rise up and lean against an old sack of wheat with a groan, and shell peas or grind something in the witch’s mortar with her pestle; whatever he could manage. Silent, the witch would continue her work of the day across the fire. Sometimes she would sweep out the hut with her knobbly old broom; sometimes she would twist twigs and string together to make little talismans, which she would hang in the doorway and change every week like doing the laundry. He especially liked to watch her mix potions, like the one she made for his burns. She made poultices of river water mixed with dark clay from the banks, and a moss she said would keep him from growing feverish. Earth, the only element that hadn’t done him harm.

The men from the village started coming to him then, every day at first. Good god woman, you’ve covered the boy in dirt. We wanted you to heal him, not plant him like a damn seed potato. The witch-healer said nothing; she was minding her footwork around these men and their swords. In a moment the men cracked up, and one swatted at a talisman hanging from the doorway like he was on the training grounds in the village. One gave the boy a playful punch on the shoulder and he yelped in pain. They seemed disappointed. The witch asked if they required anything else. Begging their pardons and all due respect, only she should change the boy's bandages soon. They looked at her hard and then rose one by one, dispersing out of the little dwelling. The one man swatted the talisman again, and this time it fell. He made eye contact with the witch as he walked away, leaving it on the ground.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

That wasn’t the only time people came to the hut. Sometimes young girls would come seeking love potions, though the witch always told them magic wouldn’t give them the right kind of love. There was also a parade of young men who wanted strength, new wives who wanted children, old women who wanted youth. Once a matronly woman joked that she needed the witch’s mask of calendula so she wouldn’t end up looking like the witch herself. The witch smiled, and said she’d need the mask too if she could only get food from a man who wanted to fuck her. The woman didn’t stay for a cup of tea.

The witch killed no living thing for food, but gathered everything from the forest. She made him eat all the nuts and beans she put in front of him at night, to get his strength back. When he asked her if they were magic, she said something like that, yes. After that she taught him a thing or two about the art of herbs and flowers, roots and berries, the small science of the forest. He learned that being a witch isn’t about being able to summon spirits, but about being curious and going out in the world to try and understand it. It was talking to the world and then listening to see what it said back. He understood a bit of what she told him, and he devoured her books like a fire. Sometimes he caught her watching him, and wondered what she was watching for.

One day, the men came and started making a fuss about a boy needs other men around to show him what’s what, and he’ll become effeminate or touched in the head or some queer thing like that, and what do you two do all day, anyway? They started asking more pointed questions about his recovery and why does he need to stay here for that and what does that mean and that doesn’t make sense, and remind us again why we need you, woman. And the witch said i just told you and like i said before and have you seen this boy and eventually they would leave, grumbling.

Finally he said to her, what are they going to do if you keep me here? And she just twisted up her mouth and said, nothing. But he didn’t believe her. Sometimes men don’t need to do anything to you for you to know they’ll do things to you. So one day, when she went out to collect herbs and mushrooms, he got up and tried to walk around the hut. He almost couldn't get up when he fell, which would have been embarassing. But he worked at it until he felt ready to leave the nest. Unlike some baby birds, he didn't have to be pushed. Just threatened a bit.

Her eyes widened when he stood up and told her he had to leave, but then they narrowed and he knew she understood. She told him that as long as she had the house he would be welcome within it. She kept talking about ancient rites and hospitality until he stopped her and told her she sounded as pompous as the men from the village. They laughed then, but the next day he still packed up a day’s worth of food and left. Even without the men, he would have left soon enough. Her house had started to feel like a labyrinth. He needed another labyrinth like he needed another burn roiling out of his flesh. The healer hasn’t come to visit with the other villagers. Perhaps she saw enough of them when they were coming by her house to check on him. He wants to visit her, but he doesn’t visit her.

He still remembers the last thing she said before he left.

“You weren’t on a boat, were you?” That wasn’t the last thing she said. When she said that, he turned around and looked at her, while she looked at him like she could figure out how to read his scars. Then she said, “What did he do to you?” And then he stood there for a bit longer, and then he left.

When he got far enough out that she wouldn’t hear him, he sank to his knees, dug his fingers into the dirt, and wept until he could have sworn he was kneeling in mud.

—

Long ago, he was flying. It had worked. He couldn’t believe it had worked. He had thought he would die, and he hadn’t even cared, but then a gust of wind pushed out the feathers and they extended with a flap and crack that sounded like freedom. He could hear his father screaming instructions at him from the tower window, but he didn’t even pretend to listen. Everything was smaller now, even things that used to loom. Perhaps another way out of a labyrinth is to fly.

He had watched the gulls for long enough; he knew how to ride the currents, spiral up toward the sky on a thermal and then fold his wings to drop straight down. He wondered if this was how his toy bird felt back in the village. It took him a long time to remember what his father told him: don’t be seen, don’t drop too low. Come back in thirty minutes and we’ll leave for home together. Watch out for rough winds. Don’t fly too close to the sun.

He didn’t remember all these things when he skimmed down to the surface and nearly went headlong into a wave, and he didn’t remember when he started making his spiraling way up toward the sheepskin ceiling of clouds. And, it occured to him when he finally did remember: why should he remember? His father’s word was not reality, and neither was King Minos’s. Yarn and feathers and the breeze off the wine-dark sea have their say as well.

As he climbed higher in the sky, he noticed with elation that the air actually seemed to be getting colder as he flew. Still, he saw the sun through radiating heatwaves, rippling like he was looking up at the light from underwater. He had been looking out at this sun for years, sitting in his window and watching it rise and set and move across the sky, and now here he was. His father had told him not to, but his father had told him a lot of things. Maybe they weren’t true. Maybe he wasn’t a dunce, a fool, an ungrateful little brat; maybe he was a bird.

He continued climbing, up and up. He remembered archery practice as a child, how the feathers would help the arrow ride the wind right to the target. That piercing yellow target in the sky. He broke through a cloud and saw the piercing light up closer than ever, and now there was heat, in intensity that surprised him in its suddenness, but then the sun was gone and replaced by—

A golden chariot bestriding the sky, a man with proud posture whose flaming hair streamed out behind him as he whipped the horses. At first it seemed like the man wouldn’t even notice him, but perhaps he made a noise.

The man’s words burned their way through his ears, into his brain. “You…you are not a flying creature.” The boy’s wings faltered at his terrible voice; he fell straight down and had to catch himself. “Who sent you here? Who gave you those wings?”

“Daedalus. I am his son.”

“I had a son.”

“Had?”

Instead of answering, the man reached out his hand and slapped him; his face sizzled where it was struck. As the man whipped the horses yet again, the boy was knocked backward in the air; he tried to catch himself, choking on the smell of the heat. He beat his wings to clear the air, but it just grew stronger, until he realized that hot, hot smell, that smell of ozone and smoke like food burned to a crisp—that smell was not the sun.

The rest of his memories happen very fast, when they happen at all. There is screaming in his ears. He is falling faster than he ever flew. He is not a bird. He is only pain. There is fluid coming out of him, but he doesn’t know if it’s blood or piss or jism or maybe all of it, all the water melted away and all his solids fried into crust. Where the sun god slapped him he can feel his face swelling, his eye is trickling down his face like tears, searing wax eating into his back, arching to stop it but never escaping, grabbing for feathers that shoot out of reach and without them he’ll die, wild groping at nothing, struggles with nothing, running in air, spiral burned feathers falling cloud waves sky waves sky burning throat lung shrieking FATHER

—

So he keeps to a routine. He mostly comes out at night, when it’s cooler and fewer people are around. He makes sure to piss right before bed. Before he left the healer said it would help with his sleep, keep him from waking in the night. She didn’t say anything else. He takes the food from the village council, but only eats the vegetables. He mostly just pokes at their bloody goat shanks, their crumbly feta cheese that leaves oil on his tongue. It’s not much, it’s not even enough, but it happens to him and it lets him think about other things instead of where to get food. Or lets him not think about anything at all.

But now he doesn’t touch any of this week’s food. He just leaves it in one corner and watches it all go to waste for a few days, until a boy from the village shows up and tells him he’s expected at training bright and early the next day. The boy is careful not to touch his hand when he hands him the summons. “They said to tell you that you have to shave, sir.” He can already picture the boy telling all the other lads in the village about the haggard beggar in the woods. He’s more like a beast than a man, truth be told. I thought he was going to bite my hand off when I gave him the draft summons. Can you believe the elders are going to let him join the war?!

But he didn’t run away that night; he didn’t go find a new village, he didn’t ask the witch to take him back into her cottage as an apprentice, or as a son maybe, he didn’t even sharpen a spear and sit down at his door to wait for them to take him by force. After all, he was the son of Daedalus, Daedalus who broke the Athenian seige by catapulting rotting horses into the city to sicken its people. Daedalus who recreated the Trojan Horse in iron so it could break through enemy ranks while carrying soldiers. Daedalus who built the labyrinth that swallowed up the youth of Crete in sets of seven. Daedalus who taught his son to fly.

So he shows up to training, bright and early. He doesn’t have his father’s sword like the other boys there, because his father didn’t have a sword. His weaponry did the work of tens of thousands of swords, but something tells him it won’t do to try to explain that to the men, who are telling everyone to run laps now and shouting at him to stand up straight and adjust his belt and a hundred other things that apparently make him like a woman. He comes to the understanding that being a man is something like taxes; a thousand little fees and liabilities and regulations that everyone can’t believe you didn’t know about already. That you’ll pay for if you don’t know.

They think he’s a natural because when they punch him he doesn’t fall back and hold his shoulder with a grimace; few things feel like hurt to him now. He wonders what these men would do if each of their left eyes melted out of their faces. Would they be like women? Nothing much they can do seems to affect him, and later a couple of them punch his shoulder again but in a good way this time, and he realizes he’s been watching them do that for his whole life without actually knowing what it meant. He gets to join them on the gymnasium steps during the break, and it almost feels like he’s in school again but without his father at home to sneer at any school friends he brings around. Still, he doesn’t think he’ll show any of them where he lives. He has no idea how he’s going to actually fight when it comes down to it, but he isn’t thinking that far ahead.

The thing is, this whole time he has let others strike him, but he hasn’t hit anyone else, not even once. He doesn’t believe he ever has. Perhaps that’s why they like him; he’s more like a punching bag than a person. Except then one man brings out some wooden swords and says time for some real practice. There’s something about the way the man theatrically looks around the whole group and then turns to look right at him that makes him think the sword thrust into his hand is not there by accident.

So he finds himself up first, and the boy he’s up against does that nice-punch on his shoulder. Is this fun?

He stabs him, or fake-stabs him he supposes, but the point is it feels unspeakably good. He understands now why Minos made the whole court watch every time he had someone killed. He even understands why the sun god knocked him out of the air like a fly. He thinks about how the village men who gave him this sword used to jokingly punch his father on the arm so that he hissed under his breath and had a bruise later on, except he still had to laugh with them even as they knew he was faking it. But still, he also wants to watch his father choke on this sword. He had no idea how bady he wanted that. He presses on, and he hears the cheering of the crowd, and imagines his father weeping red from all over him.

But then the other boy falls back and drops his sword, and his arms seems twisted somehow, and in that arm the blonde soldier sees a bird with its pinions plucked, lying there on the ground after falling from a tower by the sea. He sees a royal girl with a ball of yarn slapped in front of the whole court and all her father's royal subjects. He sees a blonde boy whose favorite toy has just been smashed to pieces by his father. He hears himself begin to weep.

All the boys in the yard say nothing. The men who were watching and cheering him on are looking at each other, though none of them are reaching for their swords. None of them punch him, nicely or not.

That’s when the boy with the twisted arm punches him with the other arm. It is not a nice punch. The impact vibrates through his whole body, and when he hits the ground it’s the same. There is a moment of silence. Then they’re all cheering again. He vaguely feels a flurry of blows but he is already back in that tower window, looking out to sea. He feels waves going through him like the ocean, pulling him under, salt in raw skin, blister pus and seaweed, his eye dissolving like an egg white in soup FATHER

__

So the next day, he doesn’t go to training. The day after that, they come to the cottage but he doesn’t let them in. He’s never used the lock before because they could kill him if they wanted, but now he doesn’t care. They bang on the door for a while, then leave.

That night they come back with torches. They don’t let him know to get out while he can, they don’t even try to wake him up, so he dimly hears them coming then is woken by the smoke heat flicker choking no god wait I survived I didn’t die I got away please make it STOP, FATHER

He makes it to the door and runs out right into the center of the crowd. Later, he remembers nothing except a knobbly broom handle one of the men holds; there is something dripping off it but he can’t tell what it is. He doesn't remember most of this later, so he doesn't remember how it feels. In the moment, though, he feels everything like normal. They all have swords, but the swords are in their belts. However, they are holding sticks. And soon they are also holding rocks.

They leave him on the ground. The tough skin of his scars weathered it just fine, but the few bits of him that were still untouched are now covered over in wounds. He can feel the dirt mixing into his blood. This is no poultice of river clay; he can feel an earthworm nosing its way through a deep gash. He considers becoming one with the earth, giving that worm a home.

—

Long ago, he was wearing what felt like a harness, a yoke. His father was fussing around him, adjusting a feather here, a buckle there, an endless stream of calculations and specifications going right past him and out the window, to the gulls. He pictured numbers and vectors blown away by the breeze. He pictured himself, buffeted around and then dashed on the rocks under the tower like a baby bird fallen from the nest.

Daedalus was almost hopping up and down with excitement. Ikarus was completely still. He was almost afraid to breathe, due to the fact that he was already on the edge of the windowsill, his feet dangling over nothing. From where Daedalus stood in his workshop, it was like he was attending to two giant wings protruding from the window. The wings mumbled something, but Daedalus reached around the top of them and pinched. “If I were the one doing the test, I could hardly take notes on the test, now could I?” The wings couldn’t argue with that.

On the other side of the window, Ikarus sat on the sill with only white downy fluff behind him, like the wings filled up the whole workshop with feathers. A peevish voice emanated from the wings; Ikarus mumbled something back. He tried to lean away from the waves, but a hand on his back pushed him back the way he was and he froze. Sometimes they say a person’s heart is in his throat, but Ikarus really felt like the convulsions in his chest were coming up to either be vomited out or suffocate him. He wondered why his fingers hurt, then realized he was digging his fingers into the sill until they bled.

Something white hot seared into his back. He lurched forward by instinct and then left smears of blood on the windowsill to keep his perch. Be quiet, boy. The wax has to be molten to get a proper seal. You don’t want your wings falling off when you’re flying, now do you? He sat still while his father started on the other wing. It’s like an envelope, son, we talked about this. When you put your seal into wax to keep your letter closed, would it work if the wax wasn’t hot? He didn’t answer. Of course it wouldn't, idiot child. Of course it wouldn't… Now keep holding still, I’m almost finished and I’ll be damned if I let you ruin this whole thing.

He went inside his head, or more like he let his mind drift out to float with the birds, until he heard a clapping sound; his father dusting off his hands. It was the most familiar sound in the world to him. Whenever Daedalus created something he knew would either kill a lot of people or bring him a lot of money, he stepped back from the final detail of the new invention and washed his hands of the undertaking, giving himself a round of applause.

Ikarus did not need to turn around to know that his father was now putting his hands on his hips and surveying the wings in satisfaction, and it was good that he didn’t need to turn around because he didn’t think he could have made himself move at all at that moment. Though if he didn’t move either inside the tower or into the air, he would stay on the ledge contemplating his death forever. He tried to reconcile himself to this, convince himself that wouldn’t be so bad because it seemed more and more like he would certainly have to do it—his father would never let him back into the tower, and he knew he could never jump.

“Stand up!” He wasn’t sure how to stand up without falling. He said so. “Well then you don’t have to stand, just shove off! Remember the technique we talked about, and you’ll be fine!” He mumbled something. “Speak up!” He mumbled something louder. “I just said you’ll be fine!” He looked down. The rocks were doused in water, the sun glinting off them.

He mumbles something. “Damn you boy, speak up!” “Father, I can’t do it.” “What do you mean you can’t do it?” He mumbles something. “So you’re content to stay here in this tower forever?” He mumbles something. “You never want to play with your friends back in the village ever again?” “Father, I didn’t have any friends in the village.” “Blast it, boy, this is no time for your self-pity!”

He says, louder than a mumble and then louder still, “Father, I can’t. Please don’t make me. I’ll die, I know I will, I don’t want to die—“ he’s practically gibbering, and it’s strange because aside from his bleeding fingertips he hadn’t actually known he was this afraid, afraid enough to let tears and snot trickle together and all run into his mouth together while he sobbed. He wonders how much he’ll have to beg to get his father to let him back into the tower. He will certainly have to endure the dark looks, the terse responses to any attempt at conversation, the slaps out of nowhere. But he has the feeling something even worse will have to happen to make up for this, his father’s sole hope for months on end.

Daedalus is silent for a long time while his son cries, and Ikarus still can’t see his father so he can’t tell what he’s thinking. But if he had to guess, he would say that his father had crossed his arms and was frenetically tapping the fingers of one hand against his skin. The wax on his back has dried, and when he moves he can feel the wings move with him. They feel like an extension of his shoulder blades, like rolling his shoulders would beat them in just the same way as the gulls did outside. They’re fluttering gently, as if in a breeze, in response to his shaking and gasping.

“I raised a worthless little fool.” The boy opens his mouth to speak, but the blow between his shoulderblades, between his wings, delays it so it doesn’t come out until he’s dropping turning wings weigh him down rushing hurtling wind knives ripping breath howling in his ears grabbing empty screaming ffffffFFFFFF

The wind swallows it, so not even he can hear.

__

He awakens next to the ruins of his house, covered in ashes that have seeped into his wounds and left them stiff, like they’ll crack if he moves. He realizes they also burned his week’s supply of food. Something tells him he can’t go into town and ask for a replacement. He remembers where that broom handle came from, and it makes him feel like vomiting, even though there’s nothing in his stomach. Instead he kind of croaks and hacks before subsiding into sobs. For a long time he doesn’t get up, but then he does.

He goes to the river, and instead of only washing the parts that absolutely have to be cleaned he walks right in and gets all of him wet. A dark cloud floats off his body in the water and he nearly screams bubbles into the current because it’s really like he’s falling apart, it’s like he’s turned to ash, floating away crumbling flooded flying filled but he bursts up through the water and takes a deep, deep breath. Then he stands up to his neck for a moment before heading back to shore.

--

Far in the future, the royal girl and the burning boy are sitting on the beach on the island of Naxos. His ship was wrecked as he approached the island, for he has none of his father’s craft in the ways of pulleys and levers and things that move one way if you move them another, but he made it to shore alive. When he arrived, he slept for days and days, taking no water and making none either, while Ariadne went about her daily routine, tiptoeing around his sleeping form. Occasionally peering down at him to look at his scarred-over eye, his wracked mountainous back. She heard that when Theseus returned home, his crew forgot to show the signal that would let his father know he made it out of the labyrinth, and his father jumped off a cliff into the sea before they got into port. Serves him right. She hopes he and her sister Phaedra are making each other miserable.

Once he’s awake and has remembered how to speak, he tells her about the voyage. A thousand times he was sure he was going to die, that his father was right after all, but then one thousand times he proved Daedalus wrong. Daedalus, who made a tube of mirrors that would let him see ships on the horizon. Sometimes he goes silent and can’t talk for hours or days, so she leaves him to putter around in the woods, carving shells and little stones into birds. In Ikarus’s hands, anything can become a bird. She still doesn’t know where that map of scars across his body came from. Or where his eye went...

Tides wash in, tides wash out. Life happens, until it doesn’t. The little girl with her yarn ball and the little boy with his toy bird are far from the labyrinth now, but they’re still on the run from stone passageways. However, this island has no walls.