What Happened to Icarus After He Fell to Earth by Andrew Jecklin
What Happened to Icarus After He Fell to Earth
by Andrew Jecklin
It didn’t take long before my attention was drawn away from the man that I had been trying to place by a mangy dog in the parking lot, sniffing around the wheels of the parked cars and trucks. Even though the dog was mangy, it had a strangely hypnotic glow about it. If, for some reason, there had been a radio dial to the world in front of me, by all rights I ought to have been able to adjust the knob so that the dog would look like it actually belonged there, between the Honda CRV and the Toyota Tacoma. As things stood however, the dog could have just as easily been fading out of the material world as fading in, which was disconcerting. The dog’s glow emitted an hypnotic pulse that nearly entrained my mind–if you’ve ever listened to a CD programmed to slow the mind into a beta-state as an aid to meditation and relaxation, then you know what I am talking about. I lost interest in my surroundings, Desiree included. Everything kind of melted away, dissolved into the ether. Spaces widened. Things grew distant. Everything, that is, except for this dog. One of the oddest things I have experienced in my life. It was a brown mutt, with dirty white fur around its neck, face and ears, with a large black collar. As I said, I couldn’t take my eyes off of the mutt as it sniffed around the wheels of the parked cars, licking the license plates clean of dirt.
The dog, after stopping in front of one car in particular, actually a yellow Hummer H2 with California plates, looked up at me. With its tongue dangling out of its mouth, nose pointing to the sky, it licked its lips then let out a yelp as though someone had yanked on its tail. I looked up too, automatically, without thinking. That’s how I noticed the low cloud cover over us. It’s unlikely that the dog possessed the power to alter reality in some way; but nonetheless, the world didn’t look quite the same after that. Compared to the dog, the parking lot was nothing but loose gravel with wheel-drum damaging potholes, parked cars, and a group of videographers telling crude jokes; but overhead, the massive, bruised colored cloud bore down on us, like it was on a mission to cover the city, completely.
As I looked up at the sky I heard a noise, a loud banging, coming from behind me. As I turned around, out of the corner of my eye I caught the dog with its leg lifted up, peeing on one of the yellow Hummer’s hubcaps. You can’t get much better than that. The air, I noticed, was wet, but it wasn’t raining. Invisible but felt droplets of water hung in the air moistening my forehead, collecting into tiny, visible, colorless spheres on my red jacket.
This story copyright 2005 Andrew Jecklin