The Shroud of Penelope

The father tore out his son’s back, and wetness leaked out onto the workroom floor in a long black puddle.  The boy gave a low whine, voice sounding like a flicked metal wire as jitters vibrated through his spine and neck.  He clicked and jerked in a way the father had never seen before.

Dropping the seam ripper to the hard table, the father slipped his workman’s fingers under the skin, separating it off the bone like a butcher with a high-pitched, sticky crackle.  Warm oil got under his fingernails as he peeled skin from ligaments.  

“Father, it hurts,” the boy said.  His shoulder blades moved as if he were trying to push himself off the white table, but his palms slipped in a pool of his own blood.

The father murmured to his son in the grand echoey chamber, which was earthen brown save for the wide strip of blue sky beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows.  Hushing him, he finished loosening the flesh from the bones, then reached in to pluck at the boy’s heartstrings with long purpose-made tweezers.  

The light in Icarus’ eyes died, and his head sank to the work table, everything but his human components relaxing like an unstrung bow.  The pain would still be there, but Icarus’ form would not move with it.  At least the father would not be able to hear his son’s breath.  Restrained hisses through clenched teeth fell harder on Daedalus’ ears than the screams that sounded like Icarus was coughing up minced meat.

The father went to work, pulling bones from their latex sockets.  The father thought he saw Icarus twitch with the removal of the spine which he worked out alongside the ribcage with a wet smack.  Black blood -- oil, he reminded himself, oozed where he snipped through his son’s tubing, his arteries were protected with small casings of insulating rubber, and a viscous gel pumped through it all, keeping the thousands of wormlike pipes gliding past each other under the skin.

What had been broken in the attempt today?  What had the maze done to his boy?  Daedalus examined the bones.  Some were twisted out of shape, but today was full of easy fixes.  The wings had holes, but they had holes every day.  The muscles hadn’t been punctured, the spine wasn’t snapped.  And even the skin was only ripped in one or two places.  

Daedalus sighed, wiping a trickle of moisture off his cheek.  It was taxing work.  The moment Icarus had dragged himself into the safety of the lobby, he’d rung a bell for his father to light the fires and unlock the door.  By the time his son had climbed the thousand steps to their towertop, the furnaces were white-hot.  Tonight, the work was fast, and the fires were cooling by nightfall.  Outside, the black sky pressed up against the grand windows like blankets with moth holes for stars.

The sun set, and Icarus awoke.  “Father?” his voice hadn’t yet returned.  It was deep, throaty and grating.  His eyes were still a dull brown.  “It hurt a great deal, today.”  The boy’s tone was neutral.  

Daedalus regretted that he had given his son such complete control over his form -- no longer could the old man spot the twitch of a jaw muscle, no longer did Icarus need to blink away tears - for he could easily choose not to produce them.  Daedalus was afraid to comfort a boy who did not cry.  

“I am sorry,” he muttered, eyes downcast.  His hands, rough and stub-fingered despite the delicate work he put them to, shook.  “Icarus, you should have escaped today.  You were capable.  It would have been easier to escape than to fly back here.”  Accusation.  They were both trapped in this tower, the penthouse suite of a skyscraper in a labyrinthine city of Daedalus’ own making.  “You must escape,” he impressed upon the boy.  He himself was too old now.  His health had been ground down at the work table each night as he perfected Icarus’ insides.

“I cannot, father,” Icarus said, his voice now light and smooth.  “You haven’t gone down the stairs in years.  There are so many monsters which walk the streets, there is poison in the air, and all their arrows and harpoons bring me down.  It’s worse than when you were younger.  It is too difficult.”  

“I have made you arms of titanium, birds’ bones of carbon, and wings from oil.  You have lungs with rubber and filters, and eyes bright as sun.  There is nothing I have not given you.  You can escape our life.”

A long pause.  Icarus glanced out the window.  With his eyes, he could see further afield than Daedalus could in the dark.  He saw dusty buildings, the careful rows of streets, the empty parks, the dry fountains, and quiet watchtowers.  He saw the high walls at the labyrinth’s edge, and beyond them perhaps a faint glitter of the stars on a silent sea.  But Deadalus, although he could see none of it, could almost taste the humid air rolling in from the water, feel its weight on his tongue.  

Icarus of course, could not.  He had been born here, after all.  How could he crave a life beyond the labyrinth, a life he had never tasted?  Icarus glanced back around the father’s lab--  at the small, round man with patchy hair and thick spectacles, at the yellowed old cots pushed against the wall, at the tired experiment table upon which Icarus had been raised…

“I’ll try again tomorrow,” Icarus said, voice revealing nothing.

His father nodded and gestured to the bed.  “Get some sleep.  I’ll clean it up.”  He gestured at the stone floor, still puddled with oil.

Daedalus tucked his boy in, folding his wings so that they would not cramp before the next morning’s ordeal.  He watched again as the gold-bright eyes dimmed off, then began to weep.  

His son had the strength and cunning to escape the prison he had made.  Daedalus was absolutely sure of it.  But like a small animal, Icarus returned time and time again.  It terrified him.  What was here?  What could possibly draw Icarus back?  Why would he return to such pain-  being picked apart each day and woven back together each night?  Each cut was agony- the father had made sure it was.  With a quiet snip, Daedalus could easily have dulled the pain.  Daedalus could have slipped Icarus out of his skin and unbent his bones and sorted them into pairs with barely a whimper.  But pain was necessary, or so the father thought. For if Icarus could not comprehend freedom, he must understand pain.  That could be his reason to escape.  Don’t come back, do not throw yourself underneath my knife.  

In the morning, Icarus awakes and prepares himself for the day, stretching, having breakfast, dressing for modesty’s sake.  

“One lick of fire will set your blood ablaze,” his father warns at the door.  Icarus is choosing to go down the steps today, rather than to pitch himself from the roof as he had the day before.  

“I know father,” he says easily, bending to put on his shoes.  “You say that every day.”  

“I worry.”  

Icarus nods with a carefully prepared smile.

“Now off with you,” the father declares, voice rough.  

Although Icarus has come home in time for dinner every day since he was sixteen, father and son never part with a ‘see you soon’, or ‘until this evening’.  Before Icarus has descended the first stairs, bag slung over his front, his wings folded in back, Daedalus has closed the door.  Before he can see his son look back.

He goes to the window where the sun is already peeking up over the sea.  The light shimmers in his eyes as he hopes hard and long that today, he will see his son’s silhouette flit out over the water, metal glittering.  Daedalus sniffs.

This is the agony of fathers: to make a man out of your boy, you shall make him protect himself, but he shall protect himself from you.  You shall want for him what you wish for yourself, because he deserves better than what you have.  This, he will not understand.  And you will be damned, for you will long painfully for the day when your creation goes away, and never comes home.