How many times must a man watch the same sun fall into the earth, until the sordid affair of life draws to a close?

It is my six-hundredth day in the constant, ever so constant. I nurse a broken wrist, my feet are cold, and I am running low on fire-wood.

My companion is lending me her patience and noting it in her mental ledger. I see how she grits her teeth at me, taming her true thoughts of my injury as she leaves me to secure us for the night.

If my estimations are correct, we should need about a young tree’s length and width’s worth of barkwood to last us until sunrise.

We can’t be all we want in this small town of ours. She can’t lounge about as a young woman of her stature should, and I can’t make myself useful as a man.

How utterly miserable it is to be so helpless!

Wilson snapped his journal shut with the spineless flap of hand-crafted paper. Despite that it had been over a year since he’d held a real bound book in his hand, he still closed his own journals the same way as he would an encyclopaedia.

Like everything else that he did that day, it was a disappointment.

The clutter of firewood cascading to the floor punctuated his self-pity. “I’m back.”

“Good.”

Willow ignored his bitter response and haunched over the fire. “I’d be too silly to think that you made us dinner, right?”

“I’m in no state.”

“So better to starve, then?”

Now it was Wilson’s turn to ignore her scathing response. She was unwilling to take his silence for an answer.

He rose to his feet, ignoring the stinging pain in his wrist and toes. Willow turned her head to look up, confused.

He forced a smile. “I’m sorry. What would you like for dinner?”

As he’d come to find out, that voice always doused her anger. “Stew?”

“All right, but I need you to help me cut these vegetables.”

She relented, and they sat back to back, each to their own chore.

The smell of tallow wafted from the pot as she handed him her handiwork: roughly chopped potatoes, chili, and meat collected from rabbits his traps yielded that morning.

“What day is it?”

“For me, or you?”

“You.”

Her answer shocked him, but she couldn’t tell that. “It’s.. the six-hundredth for me.”

The tallow was perfumed with the mouth-watering smell of sizzling meat. He was no chef, but the art of making her favorite dish came intuitively to him.

“So… it’s been two hundred twenty for me, right?”

“Two hundred and thirty-six, yes.”

“Here’s to many more.”

The tinge of hope in her voice made a pit of jealousy appear in his stomach- or it could have been a hunger pang. “What do you mean?”

Willow sighed, reclining her head on his shoulder, her fire-wood smelling hair scratching his chin. “Oh, you know. I think I’m closer to reaching the sun. Day by day. We’ll make it there.”

“Reaching the sun?”

“Yeah, like Icarus.”

“Who’s Icarus?”

She gasped, her head shooting up from his shoulder. “Wilson, aren’t you a scientist?”

He scoffed. “Well, yes, I am, you know I am-“

“Yeah, yeah,” she giggled for the first time in a while. “Sure, Mr Scientist, now it’s my turn to tell you something you don’t know. Are you sure your ego can handle it?”

He couldn’t help but smile a little. “I can certainly try.”

“It’s an old myth they used to tell us back in the orphanage. Daedalus and his son Icarus were imprisoned in this labyrinth that Daedalus built.”

“Imprisoned in a place he built? Why can’t he just escape?” he mumbled, prodding the pot’s contents with a stick.

“Same reason we can’t. The King Minos made sure he can’t escape, even though he made the labyrinth to keep in the Minotaur- a monster- and keep him safe.”

“Like our friend.”

Willow snorted. “Our friend, the King. Anyway, Daedalus wasn’t gonna let himself and his son stay in that horrible place, so he created two pairs of wings from wax and feathers for him and Icarus to fly away on, to freedom.”

Wilson imagined this Daedalus and his son stepping on a rock in the distance, strapping on their wings and flying into the sky of the Constant.

“He warns his son, ‘Don’t fly too close to the sun or the ocean. Just stay close to me, and you’ll be safe’. But because Icarus had never been free, he forgot all about his dad’s warning and flew up, up, away from Daedalus, closer and closer to the sun, until its heat melted the wax that kept his wings together. Icarus crashed into the ocean and died.”

“What a terrible story!”

“And that’s what they wanted us to think,” Willow said, delighted. “I don’t buy it for a second. I bet Icarus flew into the sun and became a god himself. What kind of moral is ‘Don’t fly too close to the sun’? Don’t be too ambitious? Don’t have hopes and dreams? Don’t try to make it out of jail?”

The sting of tears stabbed at his eyes, and he quickly added the chilis into the pot, feigning coughs. “Yes, quite.”

“We’re gonna make it into the sun too,” her dreamy voice went down like butter, carrying no gravity of the danger she was subjecting them to with her wish. “You’ll see.”

Wilson coughed again, and covered the pot with its misshapen lid.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m- yes, quite. Give dinner.. an hour, I don’t know. I’ll be resting if you need me.”

Even though their backs were against each other, Wilson could see her crestfallen expression. “Oh, okay. Sure.”

He rose to his feet, wiping his tears away with his poorly wrist, and lay down on the floor of the tent to cry as quietly as possible.

Some time must have passed, as he slept through Willow’s oftentimes-furious nighttime preparations.

His eyes only fluttered open as she rested her body down behind his.

“Are you awake?”

He made no effort to respond.

“I didn’t think I’d upset you, Wilson. I’m sorry.”

“What if I can’t make us wings, Willow?” he said thickly.

“You will,” she whispered. “You have been.”

“It took one swipe from a pig to break my wrist. It’s a wonder I’ve survived this long at all.”

“Don't say that. We're gonna make it, I tell you."