Everyone is born with a morgue mark. It’s a little symbol, somewhere on your body, that tells you where you’re going to die. Everyone has one – everyone like me, that is. My name is Icarus. I’m not exactly human. No, humans are different; they live in villages and settlements. Flickers don’t. We don’t even live with other Flickers. We appear out of the mist one day, with a black morgue mark on our ghost-white skin, and we live without aging until we find our resting places and disperse back into mist. Sounds great, right? All we have to do is avoid our resting place, and we get to live forever, right? I wish that were the case. You can’t not find your resting place. You could chain yourself to a rock on an island before you fall asleep and wake up sleepwalking in a place you’ve never seen before. There is no escaping your fate when you’re a Flicker.
Sometimes, your resting place is inches from the mist that you were conceived in, and you disappear moments after you’re born. That, unfortunately, is one of the reasons we’re called Flickers. The other reason is because humans rarely see us in the same place for long. Our life is a constant journey. We may be in one place for a moment, but in a flicker of light, we’re gone, off to follow the map laid out for us by our own body. That is the life of a Flicker. That is the life I live.
I appeared one morning just as the sun was rising in the woods, the world still hazy with dew and fog. The first sensation I felt was cold and wet; the damp grass beneath my knees made me shiver in the crisp dawn air. I took a long look at my arms and legs as they solidified from mist and came to a realization: I’m alive.
Shaking, I stood for the first time and stared behind me into the distant sun. My name is Icarus, and I’m alive. My morgue mark is two swirls and two dots on the left side of my chest, and I’m going to die in a place that has two swirls and two dots. But for now, I’m alive, and I need to make the most of it.
I took my first unsteady steps away from the sun and collapsed against the nearest tree, my breath as shaky as my steps. In that moment, I took a second to look at myself. My frigid skin was a silver white; blotches on my knees, shins, and toes that had touched the dewy grass were an inky black. Curious about this phenomena, I ran my fingers through the grass, and to my intrigue, they turned onyx as well. Lost in fascination, I hardly realized I was stepping slowly away from the sun, and lost my balance, tripping over a tree root and tumbling.
I pushed myself up feebly and shook my head. Immediately I looked at my hand. It was wet, but not dark ebony anymore. This confused me, but at the same time, made me realize that my body had stopped changing; a chapter of my life had already ended.
Not knowing any better, I headed where my legs took me. Sky-scraping redwoods shot from the ground up into the clouds, illuminated from the backlight of the rising sun. Grass and leaves blanketed the forest floor, bushes of unnamable foliage tufting the woods in clusters of greenery. Around this time, my eyes finally started to function at full capacity and my other senses were waking up too. I smelled the pine and heavy dew-sprinkled leaves. I saw water droplets slide from leaf cups and form pearls on spider webs. I felt the fallen leaves and tender mud mold to the shape of my feet. I tasted mist in the chilly air. I heard birds twitter and chirp above me.
I saw another morgue mark.
She joined me on my march, walking at my pace and eyeing me casually.
“Your morgue mark,” she began. Her voice was raspy as she pointed at my chest. “Same as mine.” She waved her right palm, where two swirls and two dots were stained in black.
“My name is Pandora,” she said, and her newly formed voice was already sounding more like velvet than sandpaper.
“I’m Icarus,” I replied.
Pandora repeated my name, and pointed to the dispersed mist, asking if that’s where I had come from. I shook my head, as I had already walked a considerable distance. Pandora walked quickly, making inarticulate grunts and barks at a body of liquid. At the time, I understood perfectly, and joined her grunting at the sight that she had discovered. It was a pond, and for the first time, I saw my reflection. My skin was the color of clouds, my eyes, nose, chin, and mohawk hair were the color of night. Pandora and I looked similar, but she had many more ebony freckles from being splashed with dew as she condensed from mist.
We were immersed in our reflections. Getting acquainted with the sight of ourselves took long enough for the sun to move a few discrete steps across the cerulean dome, and in the meantime, we talked, we ate, and we rested.
We woke up at noon in a field that neither of us recognized, but our bodies told us to keep heading west.
“Where are we going?” I asked. Pandora gave me a quizzical look.
“To our resting place. Where else?”
I gave her a long stare. “Where else” was right. Where else? Why were we going to our resting place now? This world was immense – that was evident from our great journey – so where else was there to go? In short: everywhere. The entire word was in store for us. We could go on more journeys just like this! But the difference would be that we wouldn’t die at the end.
But she didn’t want that, and I couldn’t understand why. Something about her was hard to figure out. She made me question myself. Am I normal? Is she normal? This didn’t make any sense; why were we walking toward our death as if it were perfectly sane?
This was confusing me. This body and how it changes, this life and how I’m being told it’s a journey, Pandora and how she’s the same as me but different. This was all so confusing. All I wanted was clarity, and more than that, I wanted to live.
“I don’t think this is a good idea anymore,” I said bluntly.
“What are you talking about?” Pandora looked incredulous, the setting sun peeking from behind the mountain in front of us. The rays only made her squinting brown eyes look even more mistrustful.
“I just feel like going straight to our resting place isn’t such a good idea. We’re going to get there eventually, so why not explore and travel and experience other things? Go as far as we can until we’re really ready?”
“I’m ready, Icarus,” Pandora said distantly, as I followed her apprehensively up the steep incline, hauling myself up tree roots and digging my fingers into mossy, saturated earth that led to the mouth of a cave. I answered cautiously.
“But what if I’m not? Pandora, we don’t have a choice whether we reach our resting place, but I’d rather enjoy the journey more before-”
“I have enjoyed it, and I’m ready for it to end!” she snapped. I couldn’t believe it. How could she want this to end? When this ends, we aren’t young or innocent anymore. We don’t know what’s next.
“I’m not!” I raised my voice. “If you are, that’s fine! Waste your life – you’re stupid for not wanting to stay young! You deserve whatever comes next.”
As my rant came to a close, she stood still for a moment before dashing into the cave. I called her name to no avail, then began to panic.
The momentary sense of relief I felt as Pandora reappeared from the shadows died quickly as a roar burst from her lips. Something inside me told me to duck just as her arm slammed down. A honed shard of stone was gripped so tightly in her right hand that blood oozed from her trembling fingers. Our shrieks coupled in the echo of the cave as she came at me, again.
“You have to grow up!” she screeched and lunged at me. My clenched fist slammed with a crunch into the side of her jaw.
“We’ve spent our lives preparing for this defining chapter, and you think you can just say no to it? You don’t deserve it anymore. You don’t deserve to wear my mark. This death is mine!” She grabbed me by the throat, and, with superhuman strength, dragged my squirming body across the cave floor before hurling me over the edge of the ravine. She cast the sharpened stone down with me, and it pierced my chest, right through my morgue mark.
As I hit the ground, wheezing and twitching and more afraid than I had ever been, I caught a glimpse of Pandora on her knees, dispersing into mist, just as I did.