Icarus Point

New Book, New Genre, New Voice

There’s a ghost little town between San Angelo and Colorado City, Texas named Icarus Point. Its last resident was a stubborn priest who refused to abandon, he said, “…an empty, waiting pasture where the sheep may one day return.” That was over thirty years ago. Families and businesses moved away from Icarus Point, taking the world with them. Not the life, though. Butterflies and their fiery cousins found the places where desert flowers and wild sagebrush and mesquite trees retook yellowing yards unable to resist the parching heat of the Texas sun. After the people left, skinny coyotes and kit foxes fed on an abundance of rodents, who fed on everything until every morsel people left behind was consumed. The rats moved on to better places, closer to the Colorado River, or they died, so the foxes and coyotes left or died too. Sometimes in winter, when the desert cold drives away every manner of insect, the sound of a Common Loon or lonely coyote can reach the waterless fountain at the center of Icarus Point. The fountain is gypsum, handmade, empty for decades. It was a prominent watering hole until the sun drank the water and the heat cracked the concrete foundation, making it a town grave marker now, rather the symbol of vitality it was designed to be. Before the fountain’s ruin it served as the social centroid for high schoolers needing common ground and, in its richest years, it was a wishing well seat for mothers and their children still willing to honor the very best of human endeavors: dreaming. The chamber of commerce collected the coins at the end of every August, no one being quite sure how much was accumulated or what the sum of all those wishes was used for.

The little houses and shops and the Buffalo Horn Cafe, its once powder blue edifice now bleached white, are mostly still standing like so many crumbling mausoleums where only memories are interred. Even the First Baptist Church, which was built in 1885, is still mostly there, having lost its roof to a wind storm God sent, but nobody saw. Thunderheads roll in and leave, bringing their sheets of rain and sometimes the frost and only twice in those peopleless years the snow. And like all the rest of the world the sun rises and sets in that place, a little sad and a little lonely until the moon, the sun’s only friend, chases the yellow to red to black. And then, evening after evening the bright desert stars feel the sun’s solitude, no longer gazed upon by the wondering eyes of children who threw their hopes into their lights with the same unrelenting hope affixed to every coin dropped into the gypsum blue of the now waterless well. The sun and the chasing moon and the stars set higher than them both have always known solitude in the unlivable places set across the face of the Earth. But there was a time when they touched the people of this town, casting their happy shadows or painting their singular horizon or catching their sky-flung dreams. To no longer be viewed from this singular vantage point, for these celestial bodies, is to experience the breaking of the human heart when, at the end of a life, to have at once loved so many only to watch them all pass away. Lost to the wind of time. But the sun and the moon and the stars have known this pain many times over and from many vantage points; they are accustomed to loss. They are patient, knowing the Great Universal Secret: what was, shall be again.

Icarus Point is a ghost town, a memory, a vision and it was, for twelve years, the home of the Toliver family.

Genre: Family Drama, Literary, Coming-of-Age
Current Wordcount: 2156

I’ll see you all on the other side of, what might end up being, the biggest swing I ever take.

-C.S.