Eye Contact Collage

Eye contact collage

Agony Aunt: Otherwise, feeling is inferred, or expressed nonverbally, through eye contact, or an encouraging smile.

Conductor: Making awkward eye contact with musicians while you’re conducting.

Psychologist: They avoid eye contact, or sometimes become tearful and obstinate.

Student: Eye contact with teacher during test. They think I'm cheating.

Rap Artist: Maintaining uncomfy extended eye contact witchu

Comedian: I'm joining this group: Anonymous Alcoholics. We meet at the bar at Applebees and never make eye contact.

Feminist: On National No Bra Day do your best to maintain eye contact with grandmothers.

Author: Yet somehow he seemed to maintain eye contact with me, as though he knew I needed to submit to his personality, as though he sensed I was less easy meat than my brother...

Poet: ...who lived next door to you for years but would never say hi or make eye contact.

Embarrassed: Making eye contact with someone while eating a banana is seriously the most awkward thing.

Someone at one with Nature: Such discipline carries over in the humdrum of daily existence, in walks at the park, in unexpected moments of eye contact between friends and strangers.

Strange person: I need to stop making eye contact with stray animals. I've never even had a serious boyfriend & already my heart has been broken too many times.

Tips for Guys: When she is talking to you don't look around or at your phone...listen to her, make eye contact. Show her you care.

London Underground fake notice: "No eye contact. Penalty £200"

Acknowledgements to the people who tweeted some of these lines, many of which are also found elsewhere on the Net. 

Icarusk

I intended this piece for the monthly Flash Frontier blog, where the theme for October was 'flight'.  However, I was only a month too late - somehow my brain had got itself into the notion that you could enter something due for the 1st of October in the middle of that month....

So, rather than lose the piece, which I enjoyed writing, I'm including it here.  There's an earlier flash fiction piece on this blog too, here. 

Icarusk

I used to pronounce Icarus as Icarusk, the last syllable sounding like that twice-baked bread we gave babies to keep them content, the sticky, gooey mess spreading across the baby’s face. 

I don’t know if Icarus’ mum ever gave him the mythological equivalent of rusks. Those rusks have been lost in the myths of time – as has Icarus’ mum.

She told her inventive husband, Daedalus, and her antic son, Icarus, to ‘take off those silly wax and feathers monstrosities and come in and have your dinner.’  They ignored her. She watched her headstrong son, after initially following in his father’s line of flight, flap up towards the sun, melt his wings and drop into the sea.  

Drowned. 

She stood at the top of the cliff, arms crossed, lips tight, head shaking.  Muttered, ‘Typical bloody teenager.’

Went back inside the house, ate her evening meal (put the leftovers in the cool store for the next day) took up her knitting, made woolly vests and sox for Iapyx’s baby.  Just look at him, sucking his mythological rusk. 

Iapyx is a good stay-at-home boy.  Okay, he didn’t get a sea named after him, but a live boy and a live grandchild are better than a flying fool of a son.

Her flying husband, however, seems to have got stuck on the other side of the Icarian Sea.

When she told him to stop mucking about with the wax and feathers she didn’t mean he should never come home again. 


I was going to include a picture chosen from one of the many famous depictions of Icarus falling but there are more than I can count (in a hurry, anyway); the subject has been painted by dozens of artists, including many contemporary ones.  Plainly it's a subject that speaks strongly to artists....