Upon Pulling Icarus from the Water and Finding, to Your Profound Relief, that He Still Has a Pulse
- Oct 28, 2022
- 4 min read
by Sara Solberg
Icarus is a scrappy sort, so when he wakes up after the crash, swollen eyes blinking slow and owlish against the hospital’s harsh fluorescent light, the first thing he tells you is that he wants to buy a candle that smells like space. Space is red-hot metal and spent gasoline, he says, and as he wakes up more, those swollen eyes pool with wonder. Space is the ringing silence left in a shot bullet’s wake. Space lingers like an auto shop lingers on the mechanic’s dark blue jumpsuit.
He looks so pitiful stuck in his bed — wires taped all across his chest, tubes trailing out from his nose and hands and the crook of his elbow, his shattered, plaster-encased legs elevated in slings — that you can’t help but indulge him. The candle you order off Etsy is called “Blacksmith’s Forge.” It’s not quite space, but it’s the closest match you can find. You light it like a whispered secret between vitals check-ins, setting the small glass jar on his bedside tray for him to admire, licking your fingertips and dousing the flame before the on-shift nurse returns.
Icarus comes home, and as his bones mend, his collection grows.
It starts with a DVD box set. Cosmos. He rewatches it so many times that you can hear Carl Sagan’s cadenced voice in your head when you’re away, perusing grocery store ice cream or standing in the pharmacy pick-up line. (The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be, he says. Our contemplations of the cosmos stir us.) Icarus searches for old Nat Geo magazines on eBay, bidding highest on the special issues, ones that have posters of constellations or maps of the solar system tucked into their pages. As soon as he can stand, Icarus plasters these across the bedroom walls. He downloads star-gazing books to his Kindle. Books about blackholes and gravitational pulls. He finds a used telescope on Facebook Marketplace. He frames pictures of the moon. He stains NASA logo t-shirts with spilled ketchup.
When Icarus tells you he’s going to become an astronaut — going to be, not wants to be — you keep your reservations to yourself, though you bring them up to your therapist later.
“I just don’t know how healthy a coping mechanism it is,” you tell him. “I don’t want Icarus to get hurt.”
Your therapist hums and jots something on his notepad, foot bobbing up and down like a buoy in roiling water. You decide he looks a bit like Carl Sagan.
Icarus isn’t Daedalus. He’s not an inventor. But he is very much a determined sort, and he’s learned from his father’s mistakes; instead of wax, he uses Duck Tape and Elmer’s Glue to piece together the scraps of cardboard boxes he’d dug out from the bowels of the garage.
One box is from your sewing machine. Another from the downstairs TV. The big one once held the fridge. They’re the exoskeletons you and Icarus shed as your shared life together grew.
The neighborhood children peek over the backyard fence, their red noses poking through the inverted triangles where one post meets another, giggling while they watch because their parents told them not to and rebellion makes them brave. Icarus ignores them — or maybe he doesn’t notice them at all, too absorbed in his project. (Sometimes he gets lost in his head, you know, when it’s stuck up there in the clouds.) Either way, he remains focused as he transforms forgotten boxes into a winged rocket ship that will ferry him to the stars.
People give you both funny looks when you help Icarus carry it to the nearest city playground, but you ignore them too. He’s wearing a white snow suit and steal-toed boots. His hands are sheathed in gardening gloves. There’s a motorcycle helmet dangling at his newly unbroken hip.
You love this kid, you think. He looks ridiculous, and you love him like Sagan loved the cosmos — burning and boundless and full of awe.
By the time you manage to drag the rocket onto the spiral slide’s deck, the nape of your neck has gone slick with sweat, and you wonder how he hasn’t melted in the stifling confines of his astronaut’s gear. But Icarus is a stoic sort: he doesn’t complain. Not even when you fish the matchbox from your pocket and light the candles that are taped, upside down, around the rocket’s base.
You step back. I love you, you think, but you don’t want to sound stupid, so you let it go unsaid.
He shoves the helmet onto his head. Salutes you, solemn and silent. Ducks into the rocket, closing the cardboard door behind him. There are two holes cut into the bottom; his boots poke through as he rises to full height. He shuffles to the very edge of the deck. Heaves a deep breath, barely audible above the sound of playing children. Bounces on the soles of his feet once, twice. Jumps.
You stand there for a long while, waving goodbye, watching as Icarus ascends until the cardboard rocket ship, fueled by candles and faith, becomes a speck against a sea-blue sky. Something deep inside you stirs.
Sara Solberg is a writer from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. She graduated with her MFA from Northern Michigan University this past spring and has since been busy writing fanfiction in lieu of finding a real job. She has strong opinions about octopuses and Marvel movies. Sara’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Minnesota review, X-R-A-Y, Hippocampus, MoonPark Review, and elsewhere.
