The Poppy Fields

by Nikki Erlick

Only if you looked closely enough could you see the two legs of Icarus, nearly hidden in the bottom corner of the frame, splashing into the water, where the young boy had fallen from the sky. Where he was drowning. No one in the painting notices him, and the rest of the world goes on. “And that’s what it feels like, to me,”

“Pelorus Jack. He’s named after the dolphin,” Ava said. Sasha’s face made it clear that she needed more explanation. “Pelorus Jack was a dolphin in nineteenth-century New Zealand who spent more than twenty years swimming alongside ships when they were coming or going from a particularly rough passage, near the Pelorus Sound. Almost like he was guiding them, or at least accompanying them on their way in and out of danger.”