Icarus: Brick–Pasiphaë

“If you were trying not to sound foreboding, you definitely failed.”

Agility like yours? It ain’t never too late.

Icarus used some of Luca’s dad’s pomade to slick his hair back and pretended that Luca wasn’t watching him.

That was pathetic.

He let Celestina card her fingers through his hair with new meaning. Let her kiss his eyelids, like it was benediction.

They took from Mr. Black with daring and impunity, with vengefulness and spite and pettiness.

He abandoned all pretense of silence and snatched his bag off the floor, throwing it over his shoulder, and ran to pick up the harness Mr. Black had tossed across the room.

On either side of it, the saw had torn into the rubber in deep gouges.

“We have to go. Laundry closet on the third floor with that platform we sat on when I came over before homecoming. We’re rappelling off the roof,” Icarus said.

Icarus blocked his hands with lashes of the baton, just barely managing to keep himself unscathed.

The rope snapped like a whip in the air and his stomach lurched as they plummeted like a comet.

The agony ratcheted up to a level that made him feel less than human when they dropped him on the car seat.

There was no apology this man could give him that would suffice, so Icarus ignored it.

Amid his work and his admonitions, the cheeks of the old man were wet, and the hands of the father trembled.

He gives kisses to his son, never again to be repeated; and, raised upon his wings, he flies before, and is concerned for his companion, just as the bird which has led forth her tender young from the lofty nest into the air.