Wax-Wire Wings by Samantha Rich
Her parents named her Icarus when she was brand-new and squalling, fallen from peaceful height to a world of wet flesh and cold hospital air. They had forgotten the specifics of the myth, only recalling the lovely name and a sense of something to do with wings. They thought, perhaps, the name evoked a kind of angel.
Icarus wailed, Icarus slept, Icarus opened wide eyes and watched the uncertain world go by. Icarus, though she was too small to analyze what she saw, observed.
Icarus was a child without fear. It took some time for this to become apparent, of course; a baby in the cradle has little to fear, if all is well in its tiny world, and Icarus’ parents kept her warm, fed, and safe as could be.
As she got older, though, it became increasingly apparent that Icarus lacked the capacity for caution. She was not without common sense; if something was impossible or sure to fail, she wouldn’t try it, but those things that were merely dangerous were embraced wholeheartedly. She balanced on fences and rooftops and narrow branches. She waded in murky water up to her knees and beyond. She befriended snarling cats and lost birds—even a hawk with beak sharp and curved enough to take out her eye.
She was the first to stand up and sing in class, the first to challenge whatever authority might be in any given room, the first to see how the rules would bend and how close she could take them to breaking.
And the strangest part was that her fearlessness, or her idle luck, whichever it was, protected her like armor. She made her way through childhood unwounded, undaunted, and bold.
Her parents had put away money to send her to college. Icarus, following whichever pulse in her heart compelled her to seek her own path even in open country, thanked them for their planning and took a scholarship to art school.
“There’s no future there,” her mother said. “You’ll never be secure.”
“You’ll never be safe,” her father echoed. “It’s not stable. It’s not solid. It’s not real.”
The piece she had submitted for the scholarship contest was a great pair of wings, six feet from end to end, each fiber of each feather crafted from paper and anchored together on wire and clay. Blood ran down the trailing edge of one wing, flames down the leading edge of the other, and yet they were visibly still aloft and beating. There was no body beneath them, but the wires ran down to anchor together in a painted paper heart.
“Real is relative,” Icarus said, pressing her finger to a place where the glue was thin. “And I’m not afraid.”
Art lived and beat along with her heart, rose and fell with her breath, ran up and down the fibers of her spine. She wanted to create pieces that held all of that, that put life into hard form, that quivered with bioelectric pulses that the viewer could feel under her own skin, mirrored by the pulses that animated her own brain and body.
Easier said than done, it would seem, but still, Icarus couldn’t fail. The bolder the risk, the more dizzying the heights, again and again. Professors who shook their heads over her concepts and told her that she was aiming far above her skills viewed the final products and found their breath taken away, again and again.
She attacked one of her own paintings in a helpless fit of rage, on a dark night that offered no answers to the question in her head that repeated over and over, chasing her heartbeat, never changing over the years: Why am I different from everybody else?
The painting showed a horse in midair, caught somewhere between leaping and flight, legs outstretched, neck arced high. The blurry forms of eagles approached from above, coming to bear the horse aloft to heaven, or space, or somewhere above and beyond, suggested by delicate shades of blue and purple frosted at the edges with gold.
Icarus slashed a palette knife across the canvas and filled the gashes with red, letting it fly from her brush in clots and drips. She wanted to kill the painting, to ruin it. She wanted to fail the vision in her head.
When her professor saw it the next day, he called it the most perfect capture of rage that he’d ever seen. The slashes were claw marks, flecked in the horse’s blood. They were the eagles’ work. She had added another dimension to her painting, made it live and bleed.
She hadn’t ruined anything.
She met Nadine at a gallery showing of student work, where she presented the painting of the horse and eagles. Nadine’s work was textile sculpture. She combined knitting, sewing, wire frames, and splashes of blood-bright dye to create objects that told her stories.
Icarus loved them at first sight.
Nadine had emigrated from Laos as an infant in arms; she drank blueberry vodka and Sprite from a hip flask and kept a vegan kitchen in homage to an ex-girlfriend but ate cheeseburgers in diners on the weekends. She asked Icarus on a date within moments of meeting her, when Icarus correctly identified one of her textile sculptures as being about the moment of disorientation that followed waking from a deep dream.
Falling in love was more wild than art, more dizzying than blueberry vodka sipped straight from the bottle when Nadine lost the flask down a sewer grate. Icarus still wasn’t afraid, but she felt… more about Nadine than she did about anything else she could remember.
Her senior thesis project was a mixed-media installation anchored by photos of Nadine. Two dozen photos that encompassed every inch of her, from the feathery tuft at the end of her left eyebrow to the razor-burned stubble at her armpit to the hot damp skin at her groin where Icarus pressed kisses in fading evening light. The pictures melted and blended together with paint, fiber, ceramic, wire, and flakes of metal, a shimmering, near-breathing mosaic that Icarus called My Lover’s Body in a blaze of vanishing subtlety.
She and Nadine both graduated with honors and moved into a small apartment to try to figure out how to live.
She hated to admit that her parents were right, and Nadine’s parents on top of that, but art fed the soul much better than the body. Her strange way of fitting into the universe, wherever it came from, whatever it might be, apparently only gave her luck when she was trying toward something; when she needed help for day to day living, it wasn’t there.
Icarus and Nadine did their best to live on sex and art and coffee-shop jobs, painting and weaving in the thin hours of the morning or the blurry hours of the night. Icarus sold palm-sized paintings from a blanket on the sidewalk by the park. Nadine shifted from crafting installation pieces to delicate scarves as light as a fairy’s breath and sold them from the corner of a boutique with an audience no bigger than its pride would allow.
“We can live like this,” Icarus said one morning when they lay next to each other on top of the sheets, fingers twined together and skin bare to the pressing-hot humidity of the July air. “Or one of us can go back to school and get a job that pays.”
“Are you good at anything?” Nadine asked, raising her free hand to flick sweaty hair from her forehead. “I’m not good at anything except art and fucking you and mixing drinks.”
“You could tend bar.”
“I should do that. We can live on tips.” Nadine nods slowly. “And if you take night classes, we won’t end up on opposite schedules. We’ll still see each other.”
“So it’s going to be me?” Icarus already knew that. She was the one with the luck, if it was luck, and not something stranger and heavier that lived behind her, only seen from the corner of her eye when she turned around quickly.
Nadine kissed each knuckle of her hand and smiled at her like a conspirator. “You are the one who’s good at things.”
She applied for schools and she applied for grants, declaring her intent to earn her degrees in psychology. People need help, she wrote in her essays. They need help to heal their souls and make it through the world. I believe that art is key this process, but I also know now that it takes more than art alone. I will combine the two in an innovative practice of healing. I just need your aid to get my start.
Advisors and grant reviewers remarked on her audacity, her boldness, how she threw herself skyward and asked without any of the backing or groundwork to say that she should. She asked as if of course it would be given to her. As if of course she deserved it. Arrogance, perhaps; certainly, unquestionably, pride.
And they gave to her, they opened all of their doors and gates, they gave her access to the sun.
She studied on the sidewalk, sitting cross-legged beside her blanket of art and scarves that Nadine no longer bothered to take to the boutique. She read her books, made her notes in the margins, plumbed the secrets of the mind in distant, abstract theory. When she went home to put the blanket and goods away before class, she told Nadine everything that she had learned in her readings, practicing how to reframe it and synthesize it into a whole by re-creating it for her lover.
Nadine took it all in with a skeptical face, her mouth twisted to one side while she moved around the apartment, gathering up what she had crafted that day and adding it to Icarus’ collection for tomorrow, putting dinner on plates or gathering them up again, moving the book of cocktail recipes she made a halfhearted effort at memorizing from one place to another.
(“No one wants fancy drinks,” she told Icarus whenever she asked about her progress. “Everyone wants beer. You’re the only one who’ll ever ask me to put together anything special.”
And Icarus did, every time she left class early enough to meet Nadine at the bar. It was how she showed her love, she told Nadine again and again; challenging her talents, that was love, pure and simple!
Nadine swatted her shoulder, every time, then pulled her into a bone-melting kiss that reminded Icarus that love was even more simple than that, and far less pure.)
“Is this really how people work?” Nadine asked one night, looking over Icarus’ shoulder to poke at the pages of her textbook.
“Some of them, I think. Maybe even most of them.”
“It’s not how you work, is it?”
“I don’t even know how I work.” Icarus traced the page with her fingertip, then bent her knuckle and hooked it with Nadine’s. “Nobody does. I’m a mystery.”
“It’s not how I work, either,” Nadine said. “Thank god for that. Come and eat something before you go to class and break your brain again. And I’m working all night tonight, so don’t worry about coming to meet me, just come home and go to bed.”
Breaking her brain against the textbooks kept her fully occupied at first. It was a new challenge, one that required her to bend and twist against the structures of theory. Instead of expressing herself through color and line, she had no choice but to use words now, and the change was demanding.
“It’s making you stretch,” Nadine said sardonically after Icarus finished her midterms and collapsed into a triumphant, weary heap. “That must be a new experience for you.”
“I don’t know about that.” Icarus lifted her head and made a face at Nadine before letting the bed claim her again. “You make me stretch all the time.”
“That’s either filthy or sweet.”
“Why not both?” Icarus rolled slowly around in the blankets, tangling them around herself. “I’m made of complexity and mystery.”
“You’re made of strange,” Nadine said, tangling her fingers in Icarus’s hair and giving a gentle tug. “Strangest girl I’ve ever seen.”
Over time the strange began pushing against the boundaries that her classes were setting; they were new boundaries, but they weren’t enough. Learning wasn’t enough. She needed something else.
It was exasperating. Maddening. She felt like heat and light were growing beneath her skin, pushing against the edges of her body and struggling to break free. She didn’t know where they came from, or how to channel them, only that they were there and that if she didn’t find somewhere to put them, they would either consume her or tear her to pieces.
“I just feel like I need more,” she told Nadine, lying on their bedroom floor in a patch of wan late-winter sunlight. “I don’t know what, but… more of it.”
“More sex?” Nadine asked skeptically. “More food? More hours at the library?”
“No. I’m adequate in all of those areas.”
Nadine’s eyebrows darted up. “Adequate. Be careful with that adequate.”
“You know what I mean.” Icarus sighed and rested her head on her lover’s knee, staring out the window at the flat gray sky. “It’s something else.”
Nadine was quiet for a long time, her fingers tracing in Icarus’ hair. “What about a baby?”
“What?”
“A baby.” Nadine’s voice was brittle with nerves. “A small human being. That I could give birth to. And the two of us could raise.”
In times of shock, Icarus tended to revert to responses that were also arguments. “Why do you automatically get to give birth to it?”
“Because I want to,” Nadine said, tugging at Icarus’ hair the way she did when they talked like this, about things that mattered too much to face with quiet hands. “Because it’s… it’s important to me, to make a person in my body, if I can. It’s something that I want to do in my life. And I want to do it with you. Together.”
Icarus reached up to touch Nadine’s face, then her neck, pulling her down for a kiss. “We’ll need a third person,” she said, smiling against Nadine’s mouth. “A person with sperm. At least temporarily.”
Nadine waved her hand dismissively. “We can find one of those anywhere.”
“Parents.” Icarus grinned. “Us.”
The heat and light inside her backed off a little at the idea—or else, the boundaries grew to let them have their way. Being a parent would stretch her limits in a whole new way. Maybe it would be enough to wear the edges down, to make her like everyone else. Or maybe it would be an entirely new kind of magic, one that she could understand.
Her program offered the option of taking side courses in another discipline and tying them together into a grand project. Icarus was unable to resist.
She decided to take a handful of classes in anthropology, focusing on religion, culture, and myth, looking for the roots of where psychology met story and transformed into the web of belief that held humanity together, one society at a time.
Some of it was bullshit. Some of it made her so angry she threw the text across the room. Some of it made her and Nadine pace in furious unison around the apartment, ranting about the lies that made it into text and were passed down as stone-carved truth until only the powerless remembered how to see around them—and no one would pay them any mind.
Some of it, though. Some of it rang loudly in her head and her heart, a thin electric line of truth running through it that connected in to the core of her being and made itself known. Some of it she read aloud to Nadine’s belly and the sleeping fish-slippery child within, wanting it to know the threads of the world where it would live and grow, wanting it to know truths deeper than the civilization of the moment, older than sullied air and confused, global yearning for things they all had forgotten how to name.
She pictured the baby swimming through its blood-dark sea, listening to her words with a brain that could only take in pure meaning, filtering out all bias and doubt. It made her heart feel full.
And then the day came when she read a passage that struck her like a brick to the chest, like missing a step at a dead run and cartwheeling forward to the ground.
She read it twice, and it rang in her head like bells as she reached for her highlighter. The ever-puzzled parts of her, the parts that strained and pushed at her edges, that questioned what she was and never found enough—they went still and glowed when she read those words.
She highlighted the paragraph slowly, crisply, taking care to turn her marker at each corner to keep the edges clean.
The power of a name varies in specifics, but its importance is consistent across cultures. The name grants control. It speaks to destiny. It can transfer a wish, a curse, or a very soul from one body to another. There is no greater power over fate than the given name.
Icarus tucked her marker into the gutter of the book and rose from her chair. It took ten minutes of searching through bookshelves and stacks until she found the old, feathering-at-the-edges collection of Greek myths Nadine had given her years before. Intended for a younger audience than Nadine had realized, each story was followed by a text box summarizing the moral.
She found the story of Icarus and Daedalus, paged to the end, and touched the box with her fingertip. Hubris. Pride before a fall. The necessity of caution, of listening to warnings. The importance of fear.
Icarus, rising too close to the sun.
She took the collection and her textbook both downstairs, calling out for Nadine.
When the baby was born, they named him Ereshkigal, so he would never fear death.