June 2010 — Flea Market Zombies

After days, weeks, months of spiralling moons, he had filled the cave with mounds light as air. Feathers flew about him with each puff of his breath. He coughed as the tiny ones entered his lungs. Larger feathers clung to his blood-drenched skin and made it itch.

Wild and foul-smelling, barefoot and grunting, Icarus went off in search of wax.

The bees fought him as he smashed their hives. They covered him in a raging carpet but their stingers broke against his plumage. He tramped through the woods, wearing their corpses on an armor of honey. His shape grew increasingly indistinct, swathed in broken twigs and crumpled leaves, a viscous mass barely able to move.

To fly to the sun, he had to first become earth. Tiny worlds perished beneath his thumbs.

Honeycombs dripped down his back, overflowing a bag of hides and sinews cinched at his shoulder. Back in the cave they melted and re-formed, and for a moment the cave’s overpowering stench turned sickly sweet.

So this was ambrosia. The remains of dead bees. The rotted flesh of birds. Beaks and stingers and thousands of destroyed wings.

Icarus ripped himself apart and sewed himself back together with hollow bone needles. He was already a god, dead and reborn, strapping his constructions to his arms and letting the rest drop away. Letting drop away words like “wild child” and “undisciplined” and curses drowned out by the twittering and buzzing in his ears. Was he not disciplined now, performing his daily task of shape-shifting? Would the birds and the bees have called him wild when it was they who had been buffeted by winds, far above the ground?

They had been wild, but they had not been whipped. He had been whipped. Did that not make him domesticated?

No more. The gods would answer Icarus for their crimes. He would meet them in their own nests, their own hives, and wring the truth from them. The lies inside him would fall back to earth in a hail of stones.

He stood at the rocky precipice, honey-smeared and shit-smeared, spreading wings the color of mud. Green hills teetered away from his feet. A river gurgled its death rattle. His golden-white target blazed overhead, making him slick with sweat.

The lies of his childhood filled his veins with lead. The corpses plastering his skin begged for burial.

Unthinkingly, he launched himself toward the heavens and gave it to them.