Icarus

Chapter One: Origin Story

Even after getting all his chores done, the house was still dark.

The morning before the explosion, Brantley sat caked with mud and sweat, curled over a ratty textbook in his lap. Pink pre-dawn light dripped through the open window, glaring off Ma's old sun-catcher and dappling page one-fifty-seven. Nearby, in another of the skinny shafts of light breaking through the gloom, a piece of notebook paper sat covered in a puddle of pencil shavings and graphite dust. Brantley tapped at it, looking over his answers over and over again.

His Pa walked in with a grunt, put his hat on, then crashed out the front storm door. Brantley didn't even bother looking up from the paper, but the pencil smoldered in his hand. The dry cereal he had been idly snacking on while he did his work went claggy and snagged in his throat, so he had to cough a couple times into his palm. Eventually Pa came strolling back in, hands in his pockets, and this time as he poured himself a cup of morning coffee he shot Brantley a quick grin, so Brantley's shoulders sagged back down from where they practically clogged his ears.

From there the morning went smoothly. Brantley finished his cereal, took a cool shower, sat and watched an editorial about Astro-Man on the news. Muted with subtitles on, as always, Pa crinkling through the newspaper in his ratty easy chair, Brantley dully watching Astro-Man's sharp movements as he sat criss-cross applesauce on the carpet with hands on his knees. As soon as the delicate little cuckoo in the corner ducked out of its clock with a chime, Brantley stood to attention and the two of them walked out into the crisp morning and stirred up dust and rumbling crunches of the gravel underfoot, and they piled into Pa's pickup then chugged down the backroads to the local highschool (Brantley lived too far from the school district to ride the bus; when he was five years old he'd wept into his Ma's dress because of how unfair it was).

School was normal, at first. Brantley kicked the mud off his boots at the door, swiped them on the rain mats inside for good measure. He ducked inside the main office, a tiny room in an even tinier building, and chicken-scratched his name – "Brantley Hill", all caps and in the only cursive lettering he'd ever been taught, and by his Ma, not the school itself – onto a wrinkled bit of paperwork attached to a clipboard on that shined-slick wood desk. That way at around noon when he went to lunch, he would be given a plastic tray loaded with a square of pizza along with a cardboard box full of milk, all for the price of the quarter jingling a lonely hole in his pocket. There were other kids of all ages in line to mark their name on the same daily note; they didn't say hi to him, and he was too busy yawning to the back of his hand to notice or care. He left there and walked down the halls on instinct and muscle memory, his feet carrying him as he stared at the shifting patterns in the linoleum below. He got his books in a neat stack in his bag, sat in the front row, raised his hand for all the questions his teachers asked.

At lunch he sat alone, choking down the doughy pizza-square with one hand and rifling through his bag with another. He idly twirled on the spinny plastic seat, his seat in the corner, and with a swoop of motion slapped a packet of stapled-together notebook pages to the table (he made sure to dodge the sticky spots and puddles of grape juice). The other kids milled about, chatting about some nonsense, meanwhile he scribbled out some new doodles on page twenty-three. This morning during the news editorial he'd learned that Astro-Man's power of flight was affected by emotion; in order to maneuver in the air required not only acrobatic skill, but also for the man to remain calm under pressure. Brantley wrote out an annotated note of this information next to a pencil drawing he'd made a few weeks ago. When the bell rang to go back to class, Brantley made sure that the packet was folded neatly in the pocket at the back of his pack, where Pa rarely looked.

Then, at the end of the day, in the middle of a room the size of a coffin, filled with the only thirteen other children who made up his entire senior class, Missus Davy said, "I'm disappointed." The paper she slid back across his pockmarked desk was scarred with blood-red ink.