golden wings melt like blue slushies // JJ Maybank

-And we're off to the races, places // the gate is down and now we're goin' in-

Icarus kept her eyes closed. It wasn't dark behind her eyelids, which were heavy with the grease of her remaining eyeliner. The stained lace curtains that were pulled over the two windows in her room let in all of the watery sunlight. One of the windows was still cracked. She reminded herself to find the duct tape and stick the sheet of cardboard back over it when she got up, but considering how long she'd been in bed, that would probably never happen.

The rooster clucked around in his pen outside, and Icarus could already see the mess that would unfold in the yard once John B got through the first stage of grief and started tearing the place apart.

The five stages of grief were bullshit, by the way.

And no, this isn't going to be an edgy revenge speech. There are no stages, you don't get to acceptance and become satisfied with the pain. No one goes from denial to anger and then never revisits the pain of pretending nothing happened again. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the physiatrist who named and ordered these stages herself, says that isn't how grief works.

It is not linear. Icarus liked to compare it to a never healing stab wound.

How ironic.

It would never leave, there would always be a pain somewhere in your body that no one could fix. It would never shrink. There would never be a beautifully directed scene that eases the pain.

You just learn to deal with the stab wound, and as you grow up, it becomes smaller in the body you become.

But then there are things that happen, once you grow to live with the stab wound that bleed occasionally, that people see and give you sympathetic smiles and then slowly begin to ignore and dismiss. There are things that happen, days, weeks, months, years after you've been stabbed, that stab the wound, making it larger. And then you have to grow around it all over again.

John B had a stab wound, right where Big John had been torn from him, and Ward Cameron had just made it deeper.

Then he'd taken the gold and sprinkled salt in the wound.

Icarus rolled over and reached for her phone. She found YouTube and peered through her slumped together eyelashes for the search bar, then fell back into her mound of Kermit's and build-a-bear frogs once she'd pressed play.

After laying there for thirty seconds, wondering if the ads were silent, she turned up the volume. Right, she'd silenced her phone when JJ began texting her to ask if she wanted him to slide Oreos under the door frame. She'd ignored them all, and then heard everyone trudge down to the little jetty behind the chateau.

Snakеs by the dam, I was rolling in the mud
I was feral, I still am!

She smiled, despite it all, despite the stab wounds in her heart and other places she'd rather not disclose. She couldn't help but nod her head to the beat, as she lay wrapped in her purple blanket like a child.

She was a child, really. A child that was more of an adult then most of the people on the island. And was about to get an adult punishment, because there were no gleaming bars of gold to cover her restitution anymore.

Icarus wondered if JJ would be allowed to slide Oreos under the door to her cell.

And there's snakes in the dunny

There was snakes in the shed

At least she had Peterkin on her side. The Sherriff was and would be on her side through all of this, so maybe she'd be able to wrangle a few months off her sentence once the cops showed up and found that Icarus was able to pay seven hundred dollars of the twenty-five thousand that was owed.