Dawn's Man — The Icarus Writing Collective

By Claire McNerney

I met Eos the only way anyone could meet Eos: at dawn. I was driving to work—this was back when I used to deliver coffee, it’s just as terrible as it sounds—and there she was, a rosy fingered sunrise in my rearview mirror. I made an illegal U-turn just to go say hi.

I lost my job that day, but I got the girl.

Eos is stunning.

She’s always been stunning. If you ask her billions of followers, they’ll be so starstruck they’ll only be able to respond in emojis. Heart. Face with hearts for eyes. Stars. But the most accurate emoji to describe Eos is fire. She’s brilliant. She’s bright. She’ll warm your heart. But she’ll burn you up within minutes and act like it’s not her fault.

Maybe it isn't her fault. She’s just a sun goddess, she can’t control it. But when she put a camera in my hand and told me to get her best angles, she let her red acrylic nails linger where they met mine, even as my skin blistered beneath them.

I took her pictures. I felt all warm inside when she posted them, even though all the comments were for her. She kissed me (burn marks on my lips, face; permanent scars everywhere her love had landed), told me that I was the best she’d ever had, and for a while it was good. I would photograph her in the morning, and she’d kiss me as dawn faded into day, hotter than ever.

I didn’t care that my skin was melting off when she touched me. I didn’t care that I could barely take her picture, my fingers like candle nubs stumbling over the shutters. I forgot that the red sky in the morning was a bad sign for sailors, shepherds, and especially me. Instead, I lived for the sunrise, for her to come and let me see her. I didn’t care that she barely looked at me.

I let her shine as I burned away.

Soon, I was too small for her to care about. But she had touched me with an unwanted piece of her own immortality. And so I melt smaller and smaller: a wheel of a car, a flower petal, a grasshopper, the tiniest molecule of dirt. And I’ll live forever in each atom thinking of her, and wishing with everything that’s left of me that I would have driven away from the sunrise and her dooming red heat.

Claire McNerney (she/they) is an actor, student, and writer from California, where she currently attends UCSD. She enjoys, among other things, busking poetry on her 1930s typewriter. Her writing appears in Los Suelos, Proton Reader, and Cossmass Infinities. Follow her on Twitter @claire_mcnerney or Instagram @o.h.c.l.a.i.r.e to say hello and see what she does next!