golden wings melt like blue slushies // JJ Maybank

-There's a dead girl in the pool // I'm the dead girl in the pool-

Icarus squinted.

Either the large shape on the side of the gravel road was a bin, or it was a police officer. She fumbled for her phone and then turned the torch on. Only after did she realise that if what turned out to be a bin with a seagull sleeping on top, had actually been a police officer, she would be fucked.

Then she looked down at her phone. "Shit."

It was about eleven o clock, and the light of the sun was long gone. Only the moon was helping her now, as she stumbled down the curb, her thigh throbbing where her leg was beginning to chafe, and her sweat making the blood JJ couldn't clean off sticky again. She could taste bile.

The foreshore was ahead of her, she could see the silhouette of the marquees she was probably fired from, and the jetty jutting out into the shallow clear water.

The police cars with their wailing sirens had long gone, as well as the masses of people with their torches and yells of cop killer. Now it was just her and the abandoned dark storefronts and the ocean she just wanted to walk into and never come back.

She stepped over a plastic bottle on her way to the jetty. Then she turned and picked it up, carrying it with her to the nearest bin.

The whitewashed wooden planks creaked under her bare feet, and Icarus made her way to the end. Her toes curled over the edge and the light wind asked to blow her away, but she stood, heavy. Too heavy. She wanted to slip into the dark crystal water that churned below her.

Icarus held out her phone and dropped it into the pit of sirens and sand and ways she could escape this madness. The water would be cold, but it would wash away the blood, and dead girls can't go to court.

"Dead girls can't go to court," she whispered, and a seagull shrieked like a dying girl above her as it wheeled in circles.

She looked up to the moon and wondered why people ever talked about the sun when there was something so much more beautiful. That felt mean, though. It wasn't the suns fault he burned skin and hurt eyes and sent young people with their metal wings to their deaths and was destined to explode.

Waves frothed up, white tipped like sharks' teeth. She swayed a little and longed to drown.

How tragic.

How unbearably aesthetic.

She turned and walked back down, past the playground that was black and white and grey in the night, and the rubbish that churned like waves across the crunchy grass. Graffiti was tagged on the bins.

Icarus ran a hand through her hair. When she pulled it out of the mass of knots, she felt dried blood beneath her fingernails. She wiped it on her dress and weaved around the signposts on the sidewalk, rocks digging into the sole of her foot. Bathers that probably cost more than someone would get if they turned Icarus into the police lined the window fronts, until Icarus got to one that only showcased a few posters for bands that were coming to the Outer Banks and a missing dog called snoopy.

The bench and the seat behind the glass was empty, but she could almost see herself sitting there only a few days before, sketching and sipping smoothies and not thinking of how fantastic it would be to become pearly white bones in the sand.

She stumbled, feeling bruises form on her thigh slowly. She wasn't supposed to wear her leg and walk this far. The length of town, the bridge between the islands, the bush filled with ladybugs that made her heart squeeze painfully. She stopped around the back of the smoothie shop and lowered herself behind a dumpster.

There were a few crates and a blue tarp that she pulled over herself when she curled up on the concrete.

Maybe that's what would be written on her grave.

Dead girls can't go to court.