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rhosinthorn · 7 years

Text

icarus

an original work inspired by the solar eclipse

I once had a friend.

One of those friends that when you said I’ve got your back you actually meant it, and no matter what time the phone call came, or what problem the call was about, you dropped everything to get there so you could fix it.

He was always keeping his window open, just a crack, just enough for me to push it the rest of the way up on nights when I didn’t want to be home. Never told his parents why, just took the shouting about wasted energy and kept leaving that window open. In return, I went to every stupid coffee house, listened to all the shitty poets, the wannabe fringe crowd, drinking coffee that varied all the way from river sludge to divine nectar, depending on the place. I lied to his parents when they asked why he had been up so late. He was helping me with homework, was the common excuse, and when they asked which library we were at, I told them it was the college library, which was open all night.

Sometimes it was the truth. Sam helped me bullshit the boring essays that they shoved down our throats, and I did his math homework, since even the shit I could come up with was usually better than his. We got through high school by the skin of our noses, and that last day, he slams a flier on my desk and tells me to pack my shit; he’s picking me up the day after graduation.

It was a rental flier, stolen from some beat up bulletin board in some equally shitty coffee house. Turns out, it’s an even shittier apartment, where the hot water heater runs out in the time it takes you to wash your hair, and all the floorboards creak, and there’s crotchety old people and cranky single moms with cranky babies all around, but it was his, it was mine, it was ours, and we couldn’t give a shit.

Sam got a job shelving books at the library and I got a job as a janitor at the shitty high school we all thought we’d be rid of once we had that stupid piece of paper in our hands. I still got dragged to stupid coffee houses, resented spending the money I was earning on shitty coffee and prayed that wherever we were going was one of the ones with good coffee, but now it was different.

Ever since I knew him, he was always scribbling. Always had a piece of paper close to hand and a pencil stuck behind his ear. When they made us clean out his locker, he carefully preserved each and every scrap of whatever it was like it was priceless jewelry.

And the first time he got up on that crappy stage and opened his mouth, I realized it was.

There was something about the way he could string words together that made them so much more than a bunch of letters in a row. When the teachers made us read boring old poetry, it was never like hearing what he could come up with in front of that microphone, and I know for a fact that none of the kids in those classrooms paid half as much attention to dusty old poets as every single person in those coffee shops did when Sam opened his mouth.

Slowly our world changed, like a fresh coat of paint on the walls of our apartment, but it wasn’t just covering up the cracks and scuff marks, it was new. It was late night parties in places that were probably illegal, lights and sounds and adrenaline. Some of the people around us were experimenting with things I’d never heard of, even from the pointless shit the teachers peddled about drug education where we sat through slideshow after slideshow of how whatever the evil of the week was would kill you in horrible, painful ways.

The school tested randomly, so I stayed clean, stayed away. It was enough just to be there, to be immersed in the atmosphere even without imbibing in whatever they were promising would rock my world. So did Sam, even though the library couldn’t really give a damn, so long as the books were sorted and shelved. There was enough magic in the moment, he said, sounding way to serious for it to be shitty cliché. Enough just to be there, to be a part of everything around us.

But we spent just as much time in the middle of nowhere, weekends when Sam packed us into the beat up car that was running by the grace of whatever god was supposed to be looking out for it and we drove to somewhere. Sometimes it was woods, where the trees reached up as tall as the buildings we had always known, sometimes it was moving water, a river, a canal, something long left untouched. Once it was an open field, completely overgrown.

We met all sorts of people at the coffee shops, at the clubs, at the probably illegal parties. I met girls, Sam met girls, boys, all sorts. All half drunk on his words and wanting to know him. Sometimes just get under his skin and figure him out, sometimes in the biblical sense of knowing.

Most of them were just passing fancies. Sam called them dandelions, on account of how they bloomed brightly only to wither and blow away not long after.

But there was one.

We saw him first at the coffee shop, slouched in the dark corner that we used to frequent because it apparently had the best view of the stage.

He came up to us after the mic was shut down for the night, waiting for the nightly throng of people who had clustered around like flowers gravitating towards the sun. The way he strolled up caught my eye; there were people who had their lives together, and there were people like the rest of us trying to just push through as best as we could, and he was one of the former. I almost envied him, but it was almost impossible to. This guy had a way of pulling you into his orbit and making you forget that you wanted to be anywhere else. He said his name was Apollo, and we all kind of laughed at how stupid his parents had to have been, giving a guy a name like that to suffer under.

It seemed as if we kept running into Apollo after that, as if he knew where we were going to land each night, and something…changed. The walls of our apartment were never clean, even when we had just painted them, but now the walls in the other bedroom were covered in words, spiraling out from random points. Where his words had touched you before, now they made you feel, immersing you in them until you knew you were drowning but you didn’t mind. Sam and Apollo started spending hours each day just talking, building these castles of words that almost seemed real.

And it just kept building and building, like the heavy beat of a song ramping up into the final stretch, and the two of them became lovers for however long they could hold each other’s attention, and then I come home one night and Sam’s lying on the living room floor, staring up at the ceiling. The cracked, grimy, boring ceiling.

Only he’s not actually staring, because he’s blind.

The doctors that I dragged him to couldn’t figure it out. They poked and prodded, and I spent every dime I had and got two other jobs to keep going while they fussed over him, but all he said was that he had seen the sun.

Eventually he told them to stop.

Sam came home and bumped into things for a few weeks until he had it all sorted. There was one day, I come home for an hour between shifts and he’s tracing the words he had scribbled all over his walls as if he can see them.

Apollo is gone. Has been gone.

I asked Sam, that first night, if he was blind because of Apollo.

No, is his first answer, loud and strong and furious, as if angry at me for even suggesting it. Yes follows just as quickly, just as adamant, and then he settles, turns his face towards me and says maybe?

I looked at the sun, he kept saying, every time someone asked. The doctors mumbled something about it being plausible, based on what they were seeing, but at the same time improbable, given that the only thing that could do that amount of damage was an eclipse, and it had been decades since the last.

Strangely enough, his words started meaning more. Even though he couldn’t see, his words painted pictures for all of us sitting in those dim coffee houses. Pictures of places and people and experiences that Sam had never, would never, could never see. And it wasn’t like he was listening to those books on tape, or any of the other ways they tried to teach him to adapt his life.

Someone talked about a guide dog, but Sam said no. I could barely convince him to use one of those canes, no matter how many times he tripped or fell or bumped into someone on the street. He hated it, hated feeling what he had once seen. It was better to stumble, to almost get hit by cars and bikes and other pedestrians.

I feel, he tells me in the middle of another shouting match, a fresh bruise on his cheek where he caught the edge of a door. I feel.

Because there’s no use arguing, I stop. It’s easier to keep the box under the sink where all of our medical shit ends up stocked than to keep having the same argument over and over.

One night, as I’m patching him up, he starts telling me about me, about some stupid kid from a shitty family who has a best friend who’s worth more than most brothers. He’s not using our names, but I can see us in his words. But he goes on and tells about a girl, about a home, about someone to say welcome home, and I brush him off. Guys like me don’t get that. It goes right up there with the pipe dreams about picket fences and 2.5 kids. Probably took a knock on his head today that he’s not going to admit to.

I forget about it for months, and then I meet this girl.

Her name is Hestia, and she’s everything he said and more.

She doesn’t give a shit about our crappy apartment, and whenever she’s there it seems less crappy. I met her at a diner I keep ending up at because it’s in between the two jobs I’ve kept now that he can’t work, and everyone there seems to love her.

And somehow she picked me.

We’re talking one night when I happen to look at her, and I see her eyes. They’re old, old eyes, and I had never understood what that actually meant until I saw them. But now I do, and I remember something.

Apollo had those same eyes.

I was a pretty shitty student, but something about those Greek myths stuck in my head. Maybe because most of them were about screw ups like me, and maybe because Sam practically lived and breathed them whenever they came up in class. The teachers never could figure him out, because he would fixate on these ancient poems and then turn around and bitch about Shakespeare.

Something about those names is familiar, and I find myself in the library, a book of myths in my hand, and in them I find Apollo, and further in I find Hestia.

I looked at the sun.

When I got home, Sam was there, just him, icing a bumped elbow. He seems to know, even though he can’t see my face.

Does it matter? he asks, leaning against the doorway as I stare at him.

Yes I want to say, I want to shout. Yes it matters. What business do they have with people like us, with shitty apartments and shitty coffee, and too many jobs and not enough time?

Sam just turns away and shuts himself in his room.

I stop seeing Hestia.

Sam disappears.

Somehow, everything seems…less now. Smaller.

AN: Don’t know where this came from, but it was tricky. The entire viewpoint is something I don’t usually do. Hope you enjoyed.

#original fiction #my writing #icarus #solar eclipse 2017

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