The sea breeze is suddenly silenced as my father's fingers brush over the wax marks where the wing bones meet one last time. My toes dangled over the edge of the cliff, and clusters of wild fennel were brushing against my calves in the rock crevices-they trembled more than my knees.
“Remember the shape of Crete under the clouds.” His admonition wrapped in saltiness sticks to the back of my neck, and I've lost count of the number of times I've rubbed my thumb over the bamboo joints of my fins. As the seventeenth wave broke into white foam beneath the cliffs, something hotter than blood suddenly toppled the sky.
The world was twisted into a spiral the moment it took off. The force of the air currents holding up the plumes was so great that it was as if the sky itself were tearing at the man-made shell. The wind carried a metallic fishy sweetness as it poured into my nostrils, and I saw that my shadow was being pulled into slender arrows that pinned the sea into quivering silver foil. The gray finch my father had transformed into hovered below, his shrieks woven into silver threads by the wind, and I was greedily devouring every inch of the rising air.
Icarus fell
I can taste the melted honeycomb trickling down the ridge and furrow, the sweetness wrapped in a salty breeze that pastes my throat. As the last cloud brushes the center of my foot, the feathers suddenly become too light-light as reeds with their medullary tubes removed, and the currents of air that once lifted me are escaping screaming through the gaps in the feathers.
The sun’s silhouette began to collapse into a pinprick, while the golden flames traveled down every pore to the viscera. The iris pattern my father had sewn to the tips of his wings was curling, the charred edges tumbling like a parchment scroll licked by tongues of fire.
The right wing was the first to betray me. A certain wing bone suddenly softened into honey pulp and the whole sky began to tilt to the left. The wind is no longer a supporting hand, but a million silver needles piercing through the plume, zapping any clouds that were once stored into festering lint.
The moment the wax tears dripped into the back of my neck, I suddenly remembered the albatross that had crashed to its death on the rock face early in the morning – it had made a similar crunching sound when its collar bone broke. This moment’s fall was like another kind of flight, only the direction had been inverted by the gods in a wicked play. I stretched my arms out to fish for the scattered sunlight, but instead grabbed a handful full of cold stray flames that dragged out long comet-like howls as they leaked through my fingers into the abyss.
The salt foam at the tip of the wave glinted with the fear in my father’s eyes. The last intact feather suddenly breaks free of its shackles, and it hovers and rises with such grace that it is as if my undescended soul is swooping ahead of the sun.
Icarus fell 