Re: The Icarus/The Fallen
“I never thought I’d say this,” he said, mouth twisting around the bitter taste of the words before they’d even slithered up the column of his throat. “But it’s not really a matter of belief. Paradise is, and you either have or you haven’t. Whether you know it, that’s your good fortune or shortfall.”
He trailed behind Enlil like something weightless and only tethered lightly to the taller man’s belt, churned in his wake, instead of the heavy husk of a man that he’d made. Drifting as the adrift, pulled into his orbit and content to stay there as some form of security blanket. The kind that might put a child in danger of being smothered to death as they lay dreaming.
“I wouldn’t be the wretched thing you see before you, were I not a fool. Trust me, I know this,” and again Nathaniel saw in his mind a flash of his wrist’s paper-thin skin, parting like the waves for Moses and his staff. If only the staff were tipped with tempered steel and angled just so for opening arteries. Enlil walked with an elegant grace that he couldn’t match, and he cared not to try. He was too busy wondering if his veins would look green and blue once the skin peeled away. “All I have ever done on this earth is notice.” ‘All’ might just be a matter of hours, but the fact remained.
Nathaniel tried and failed not to look around too curiously as they entered the room, and he thought about his own bare shelves and the single change of socks he’d had time and wherewithal to pack. He looked into a mirror that reflected back iceberg blue, just big enough for one of his eyes. “If you saw me for a fool when I sat down, why wouldn’t you tell me to leave?”