Henry didn’t like school. He had tried to explain this to his mother on several occasions, but she never listened. She was always too focused on herself to care what he thought. Since his mother was always a dead end, and his father had skipped town inexplicably when Henry was only a toddler, he was forced to turn to the only two people left in his life who cared for him: his siblings. Today, Henry’s topic was school bullies. He knew immediately that his older sister, Penryn, would be the one to talk to about this rather than his brother. She was always more understanding than Xander, who thought he had to be the “authority figure” because he was the oldest out of all three of them.
When Henry arrived home, he bypassed the kitchen as quickly as he could. His mother was sitting at the dining room table on the phone, a cigarette hanging loosely in her hand as she yelled at some poor soul on the other end. She didn’t acknowledge him as he ran past her, taking the stairs up to the bedroom he shared with his siblings two at a time. When he had reached the safety of their room, he shut the door quickly and leaned against it. Penryn and Xander were already there, seated on the floor with textbooks open in front of them. Henry’s face must have given his unhappiness away, because the second Penryn looked up at him she asked him what was wrong. Not a minute later, Xander left the room to do his English reading outside in order to give the two space to talk.
Penryn sat down on Henry’s bed and patted the space next to her, clearly intending for him to take a seat beside her. He did so, his small legs dangling over the edge limply.
“Now then,” she said, putting an arm around him, “What’s the matter, little brother?”
Henry let out a small sigh. “The boys were trying to kill a frog at recess. A small one. It was hopping around trying to get away, but they had it cornered, and they were laughing.”
“Did you say something to them?” Penryn asked. Henry nodded.
“I told them to stop, that it was just a frog and it wasn’t hurting anyone. I started to think that maybe the frog had a family, brothers and sisters and children that it didn’t want to leave behind. Things it would miss.”
“And what did they say?”
“They told me I was stupid, that frogs didn’t have thoughts or families. Then one of the bigger boys squashed the frog with a stick. Splato. And just like that it was dead.”
“You have a big heart, Henry. There’s nothing wrong with that.” Penryn said, pulling Henry in for a hug. “When your classmates are older, they’ll realize how special you are.”
Henry doubted that, but he relaxed into his sister’s hug anyway. She couldn’t make him feel any better about the situation, but she had a nice way of comforting people.
“I just wish there was a way to escape it, you know?
“I know a way.” Xander said, reappearing in the doorway. He threw his English reading down on the desk and stood across from Henry and Penryn, leaning against the bookshelf.
“You ever heard of the tale of Icarus and Daedalus, Henry?” he asked.
Henry nodded. “We learned about it in school the other day. It’s the one where a king hired a craftsman named Daedalus to build a labyrinth so they could imprison a beast called the minotaur. He built the maze, but ended up angering the king. He and his son, Icarus, were imprisoned.”
Clearly not having heard enough, Xander picked up the story where Henry left off.
“In order to escape, father and son had to create wings that could lift them off the ground and help them fly away from the king’s realm. Their wings, made of feathers glued together on wooden sculptures with candle wax, worked. Together they rose higher and higher, away from their prison, until they were soaring over the ocean. Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun, for fear that the wax holding his wings together would melt. Icarus ignored his father’s warning. He was too ambitious. The sun melted the wax holding his wings together, and he plummeted into the sea. He didn’t know how to swim, so he drowned.” Xander finished.
Henry’s brow wrinkled in confusion as he looked at his older brother.
“That’s true. But what does the story have to do with anything?”
“Because you said you wanted to escape, you wanted a way out. Well I have a way out, and we can all go, all three of us. We can be like Daedalus and Icarus, but without the whole drowning part.” Xander replied.
Henry paused for a moment, thinking. “What about mom?”
“What about her? It’s not like she cares about any of us. She wouldn’t miss us, she’d be glad we were gone.”
“I don’t know if this is a good idea.” Penryn said, speaking up for the first time since Xander had re-entered the room. The siblings fell into silence.
Henry bit his lip, thinking over Xander’s offer. Doing what he suggested basically meant running away, which he had always viewed as a bad thing despite his dysfunctional relationship with his mother. He wanted to escape his life, the school, his mom - sure. But could he actually do it?
“If we did, where would we go?” Henry asked.
“Wherever we want. We’d have wings, and they could take us anywhere.” Xander replied, staring out of the window at a bluebird that had perched on a tree nearby. He seemed completely undisturbed by the idea of running away.
Henry weighed his options. He could either stay here, with a mother who didn’t love him and classmates who didn’t understand him, or he could leave with his siblings, the only two people in his life who made him happy. He made his decision.
“Let’s do it.”

.   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

Building the wings didn’t take nearly as long as Henry had expected it to. Xander gathered the supplies they needed the day after their conversation about the project. Henry had arrived home from school that day to his siblings working away on their pairs of wings, which he immediately started helping them with. He abandoned his homework in favor of working on the wings, which completely baffled his teachers. Henry was usually punctual with every assignment.
Even though at this point they were nearly finished with the wings, Penryn still thought it was a bad idea, but she knew that her input would go nowhere with her brothers, as they had both set their minds on the idea of flying away, so she simply went along with it. The wings were pretty magnificent, she had to admit. The three of them stepped back to admire their work.
“We leave tomorrow from the docks at the ocean.” Xander said, looking at his brother and sister.
“Why the docks?” Henry asked.
“Because we need something to jump off of for altitude, and I’d rather jump off the docks than a cliff.”

.   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

The three siblings stood on the end of the dock with their makeshift wings strapped onto their arms. Henry wobbled a bit under the weight of his pair, but he remained upright so as not to seem weaker than his older brother and sister. Penryn reached for his hand to comfort him while Xander looked out across the ocean to the horizon far in the distance.
All three of them stood with nothing but the clothes on their backs, mostly because Xander had explained that they would fly higher without the burden of supplies to weigh them down. One by one, they each raised their arms, causing their wings to spread out, overlapping on the short end of the dock. Henry lost his grip on Penryn’s hand when this happened, and the cold wind that met it instead of her warmth made him slightly more terrified. It was not like they were extremely high up, the dock sat only a few feet from the water, but Henry couldn’t swim, and if the wings failed him then he would most certainly drown in the ice cold water below. To make matters worse, a storm was brewing in the distance. The black clouds of rain shrouded the would-be sunset and snuffed out its light as the sea turned violent. They should have picked a better day to fly out on. Henry didn’t think Xander had looked at the weather report beforehand.
Without a word, Xander jumped first. Completely ignoring the storm, he leapt towards the sky, flapping his wings obscenely as he lifted higher and higher away from the churning water. When he was just a speck against the clouds, Penryn turned to Henry and gave him a slight nod of encouragement before leaping off as well, following her elder brother. Henry watched her until she too was just a speck before shuffling forward to the edge of a dock. He bent his knees, ready to jump, but something caught his eye in the darkened waters of the ocean. Blinking away the salty spray from the waves, he straightened himself again and squinted at the thing drawing closer and closer. It looked mysteriously like a lifeboat one would see from a big ship, huge and yellow and round. He couldn’t see anyone inside it, and was ready to forget about it completely when a girl stood up from inside the small raft. Her dark skin was contrasted by the vibrant yellow of the lifeboat as she stepped up onto the side of the small vessel. Strands of her tangled hair whirled about in the wind as she tried to shout something over the din of the oncoming storm. Henry couldn’t hear her, but he swore it sounded like she was trying to warn him of something.
A huge clap of thunder made Henry look towards the sky, and when he looked back at the ocean, the girl and the raft were gone. Looking around, he decided to spread out his wings again. It wasn’t raining yet, and if he got into the sky before the storm truly began he could still join his siblings. Still though, he was afraid. While he was internally debating whether or not he should actually go through with the plan, he heard shouting from the dock behind him. He glanced back to see his mother running towards him quickly, terror in her eyes. He had no idea how she had even found him in the first place, but he didn’t care. Henry ignored her, and turned back to his task. After years of her shutting him out, he was relieved at the chance to finally get to do the same to her. Henry took a deep breath and pumped his wings, leaping off the edge of the dock.
For a moment, he was doing it; he was finally flying away from a life surrounded by people who didn’t understand him. It was the first time in a long time that he felt completely free. His happiness was short-lived, however, when not long after he jumped, his wings gave a terrifying lurch. Henry looked back and saw feathers starting to peel away from the skeleton of wings that Xander had built. He tried desperately to turn around, willing his wings to work for just a little longer, but they didn’t. He started to fall as the rain did.
Henry heard his mother scream when he hit the water. He felt the waves drag him under. He saw the darkness of the sky above him as the ocean swallowed him. He felt panicked, but he somehow knew that he couldn’t fix what had happened. He wondered vaguely if this was what Icarus felt before he died: a sense of sorrow-filled peace. Before his eyes closed, he saw the girl from the lifeboat again. She was floating a short way away from him, but this time, she was motioning for him to join her. Henry tried to reach for her, but he couldn’t quite get there before his eyes closed. His last thoughts were of his siblings. He hoped that they had gotten to where they wanted to be, and prayed that they were safe.
A few days later, an article was released in the local paper about the incident. It read: Mother Loses Only Child in Drowning Accident.