Icarus and The Magpie (Short Story)

(6) Pennon, The Sleeper.

"Mine, is a world unseen."

A breathing, moving, ebbing thing. Just... out of reach. Tickling the tips of tongues with a long hidden familiarity; whispering into quiet ears with a lovers gasping. A Deja-Vu. But, above all, it is a cruel place. It is a frost snapped, wasteland. A place you cannot go, a place you cannot leave. It is full of half given promises and words left unspoken. Written through the pages of something called a journal. How silly my life must be, when lived only on paper. I am captive here. I am free here. Just beyond these jagged borders lies a reality. The end of the dream. The edge of the painting. The end of me. here, I existed... Here. I came to be.

Pennon, existed.

He knew it. Even if he was never awake, long before he had his eyes, and that much longer than he found a voice to lend words to.

He existed.

It was plain, scentless, and starved of touch and thought. Breath never found him, though he felt it leaving, and eventually, filling the sails of his lonely musings. He was the nothing, he was the empty. He was. He was. He was so much of nothing that he was beyond ceasing. He was beyond leaving. He existed.

Pennon fidgeted with the ends of his cloak. He felt the bending of his impossible feathers. The impossible weight of them on his back. How flight, even now, could not be possible. This was a terrible addition, and he knew it. The burden of a past capability thwarted by reality. But they were there, and they were his. He hadn't done much as move through her apartment, find a seat on the floor of the empty living room, and begin to study his odd handiwork. To play with the charcoal smudged on his fingertips. No matter how much he rubbed, it remained. An endless falling of powder. They were all, ash and bone. Endless. He watched Iris busy herself with groceries. Something she said they needed, though he never felt it. Hunger never touched him. So the pangs were foreign. But she could feel them, and that was all that mattered to him.

"How do you like your eggs?" Iris shouted from somewhere behind the counter. She was buried elbows deep in the trenches of empty drawers that made up her small kitchenette. He liked to watch her. He was lost in this dream. He never wanted to wake.

"Any way I suppose." Penn balled his fists and rung them out. His mind was wandering the fields of unpicked flowers and sun kissed grasses they had left. How foreign he was among them. How at home, Iris was.

"You suppose-" Iris chuckled. "-alright, sunny side it is."

Undoing the button at his chest he unfurled his wings. Letting them stretch and bloom like flower petals in the sticky afternoon rays. Time didn't seem to touch him, and he had no grasp on it. What were minutes, what were hours wrapped in days like silk ribbons. He didn't know. Sunlight played over the floorboards and onto his lap. He traced their edges against his skin and clothes. After some time (it had been, the light no longer fell on his lap) Iris came to him.

"Here you are-" She settled a plate on the ground and joined him with her own.

"So I am."

"Sunny side and toast." She set a fork next to it.

"Right." He took them up and stuffed a bite into his mouth without question.

"So??? What do you think?" Iris smiled plainly.

He couldn't taste a thing. "I can't say I've tasted before." He swallowed, taking in another bite. The warmth spread over his tongues and pressed against his gums. "I like it. Is it supposed to be this warm?" Each bite was a kiss. A kiss she made for him. So, it was good. It was everything good. "It's perfect."

They sat there, eating in silence. Both staring at the twisting branches and hanging flowers that covered the wall and blotted against the windows. Penn hadn't been here long. But he knew the place. He remembered it. Just like he remembered his name.