Filicide

I am the modern-day Daedalus when it comes to aviation enthusiasm. I might not be the first man to fly a jet pack or a human-sized flight machine that title probably goes to Yves Rossy. I am, however, pretty damn good at designing and building these flight machines. Being a former military pilot and an engineer, I’ve created a few dozen flight devices over the years. Now I say I am the modern-day Daedalus because my flying days are behind me, due to a very unfortunate accident. One that has turned my world upside down quite literally.

Now, I am sure this accident would’ve happened one way or another, in fact, I think I am guilty of the crime of filicide. Yeah, I think I killed my son. I did not physically murder him or anything like that. It was more of murder by negligence. I was a terrible father, I must admit. I was being too strict on him when he was a kid. I would implement my military mindset onto my civil life. I know I shouldn’t have done it, but I did… I knew none better back then. It’s not like I was making him march and salute me or anything of that sort. Instead, I was demanding too much from him; top grades at school, best behavior at home and in public, to keep himself in a peak mental and physical condition (not to cry over things children should be fine crying about, not to be what I called intrusive, to be punctual, have the best manners, be the most respectful to his elders, and so on and so forth.) I demanded perfection from my own kid.

Hell, he made me the proudest father at any occasion, but I’ve neglected to let him know that.

And for the love of Christ, I hate myself for that; I wish to I could just bury myself alive, but as you can probably tell, my faith and self-discipline won’t allow it.

Little did I know I caused my boy to develop an inferiority complex.

Now I don’t know how much of a common knowledge it is, but the condition does not simply make one feel worthless and beneath those around him. This complex gives people a literal chip on their shoulder. People who suffer from Inferiority complex force themselves to a standard of unhealthy perfectionism.

My crime is never noticing how my Jon went down that path.

I never noticed how he became a clean freak, overly pedantic and punctual. Maybe I've missed it because he wasn’t exactly pathologically obsessive in his perfectionist tendencies.

When my wife died from breast cancer, I sank into depression, but he wouldn’t… I was in awe of what I thought was his strength. Now I know it wasn’t strength, it was his weakness or rather his aversion towards weakness. It must’ve been hell inside of that head of his. Admittedly, I sank into a slight borderline alcoholic phase for a time, but Jon, my dear Jon, he wouldn’t relent from being the perfect son. And if I’m being perfectly honest, I was a dick when I got drunk. I would berate him and goad him into arguments, but he wouldn’t falter for my drunken bullshit.

Or so I thought.

He was probably dying inside whenever I called him something and was projecting my anger and pain of being unable to save my wife onto him.

Gradually, however, I got better, in part thanks to my son who opted to drop his personal life in order to take care of me, imagine that, being a kid in your late teens and choosing to help your shitty father over friends, a romantic partner and good grades in college.

I didn’t deserve that kind of child.

I deserve the kind that would shoot me in supposed self-defense over a petty screaming contest.

They say the pen is mightier than the sword, well the spoken word has probably killed far more people than any gun, take notes from any charismatic dictator. Have they ever stained with blood? Probably, but not the oceans of blood they’ve convinced their followers to spill.

Anyhow, gradually things improved, and we’ve moved on with our lives. We kept in touch throughout the years; I was never the super social kind; instead, I stuck to a few military buddies and my family. I spent most of my time on my job and creating artificial second-hand bird wings.

At some point, Jon started showing interest in my hobby, and we ended up working on these projects together during the weekends. By then he had already started his own family and became a father in his own right. He was nothing like me; he wasn’t pushing his kids, and he was always showing kindness but then again, so was I with my grandchildren.

I’ll have you know this very important detail now; Yves Rossy might be the first, but he’s definitely not the only man out there to fly a jet pack. It’s somewhat widespread by now in the aerial enthusiast’s community.

I’ve built a jet pack for myself, and eventually one for Jon, we’d go on these small-time flights all the time. That was great. However, that was when I truly noticed just how much damage I imparted on my son’s soul. He constantly tried to outdo me in these flights, be it gaining greater height or greater speed, it steadily graduated to trying to flip the most times he could.

That’s when I told him I avoided performing flips because after I tried a couple of consecutive ones back in my military career, I almost shat myself with fear. He laughed in my face, saying I’m probably lying just to get him stop him from doing that himself. He rationalized himself by saying that all of my friends from the army always said I’m the best pilot they know.

Flipping your aircraft does not make you a good pilot, but he wouldn’t take me seriously.

That takes me to that dreaded day. Our biggest flight up to that point, half an hour of free flying over the Arabian Desert. I got us all the permits and paperwork done, along with a local rich sponsor who has a huge thing for flight.

We went there and got everything set and took off early in the morning.

We had reached about ten and a half thousand feet into the air before making our jump into the heavens.

Moments before the jump, I held Jon close and told him to make me proud and to have the fun of his life.

I fucking hate myself for doing that.

He looked at me and said, “I love you, dad, and I will!”

There was our opening, and we both jumped, I was out first and Jon followed a few seconds after me.

We both stabilized our flight pretty quickly and immediately I could see him pushing his jet pack to the limit. He was speeding away.

I called him through the radio system inbuilt in our helmets, “Jon, slow down, you won’t make it to 30 minutes of air time like that.”

“It’s fine, pops, I want to show you something,” he said.

My heart sank immediately. He was going to perform consecutive flips. I knew it.

“Jon, don’t…” he cut me off.

“I will make you proud, pops, promise.”

“Jonathan… slow down…” I tried to sound as composed as I could.

He didn’t respond.

“Son!”, I called out into my mouthpiece.

“I’m fine, pops, watch me fly!” he retorted as he flipped himself in a perfect circling motion in the air.

I couldn’t look at him.

He flipped a second time.

Then a third.

“Woohoo, dad, look at me. I’m probably reaching your records now!” I heard him call out.

I forced myself to look at him; he was far higher than he should’ve been and he was gaining more height. It looked as if he was trying to reach the sun itself. By the time I uttered another word, he had been in a vertical position.

“Jon sto…”

One wing on his jet pack snapped at an angle much to my shock.

“Jon! Jon! Pull the parachute! Fuck!” I yelled out as I tried to fly closer to him.

He was screaming all sorts of profanities as he was falling from the sky.

The two seconds between his wing breaking and him pulling out his parachute felt like an eternity. My head felt dizzy and my heart was racing far more than it should have. I felt myself losing steadiness… I was shaking.

His parachute finally came out, and much to my horror, it got tangled and wouldn’t open properly.

My son, my only son, he was falling towards his death at insane speeds.

I had to do something.

Dark thoughts clouded my better judgment, and I made my way towards him, I flung myself downwards to catch him and land us both in one piece.

I know, its stupid, but parental instinct is unbeatable, this and I was being hubristic at the worst possible moment, best pilot my ass.

My boy, he was screaming the entire time he had been falling.

These screams still haunt me to this day, every night in my dreams, I see his mortified face as he falls to his death, his skin and flesh slowly melting away from his skull as his body speeds up towards the ground below. Every time I get lost in thought, I can hear him screaming for me.

I wish the dreams were the worst part of it all, but as terrible as my dreams seem to appear, nothing can top the state in which I found him when I landed.

I don’t know what I was thinking, not at that moment, not my whole life.

I wasn’t thinking straight.

I wasn’t thinking like a father.

I was flying towards him, my arm outstretched for him, his screams driving me to the brink of sanity with fear and worry.

An inch apart.

We were an inch apart.

I could feel his fingers on my arm.

“I love you, dad…” That’s all I could hear then before my ears went blank.

My son was out of reach once more, this time, there was nothing I could do.

His parachute wouldn’t open.

His flying apparatus broke.

He was a living corpse at this point.

Tears flowed down my cheeks, clouding my goggles.

I wouldn’t let go of my son.

I couldn’t.

So, I flew down faster; I pushed the jet pack faster than I ever had; I was trying to grasp at him once again as the world around me faded into a morbid blur.

He was too far away.

Then he crashed onto the sand beneath us.

I opened my parachute at a dangerously low point, and I was crying like a kid and lost all of my balance by that point. By some stroke of luck or rather by the force of a curse, I landed eventually.

My landing was terrible, I landed at a bad angle and the impact broke my back in three places.

Collapsing to the floor with pain shooting through my spine sending a wildfire through my nervous system, I forced my way towards the body of my son. I tried to pull myself up, but I couldn’t; my legs hurt too much, so I just crawled.

I wish I hadn’t.

He was in pieces; the impact had contorted his limbs in an awful angle and spilled his viscera outside of his body. No blood pools or anything, just a cracking of the skin and flight suit with guts poured outside. I could even notice bone shards. The force collapsed his face was completely inwards as his brain was mostly out of his skull.

I grabbed that mash that was left of his head between my hands; I didn’t even care it felt like rubber and gelatin in my hands. I held it tightly to my face. I kissed whatever I could, begging for forgiveness as medical staff and a worried staff crowded around my broken self and the remains of my son.

Everything went cold and dark afterward.

For the next three days, there was nothing but nightmares; nothing but hellish nightmares in which I found myself free-falling in a blood red sky over a sea of white bone-like thorns and a black sun. In these dreams, a deformed angelic figure would appear at first. It looked exactly like the remains of Jonathan; its limbs bent at unnatural angles, no, its whole body was bent unnaturally its guts floating about around it like tentacles, a caved skull surrounded by disgusting pieces of skull and brain matter. It also had featherless, misshapen, gigantic wings sticking out of its back.

It started as one, and then it multiplied until it became a legion of these things.

They were all screaming at me that everything was my fault; they were screaming at me I was the reason they were what they were. I was the reason they were in so much pain. Their voices, inhuman, guttural and awful deep. If you could translate a mix of anger and pain into sound, these voices were what it would sound like. Each dream would end with these things smothering me with their physical forms before dragging me down to the ground sending lightning bolts through my spine.

Each dream would end the same, and at each dreams end, then I would black out only to find myself free-falling once more in this horrid dreamscape.

After three days of this endless torture cycle, when I finally came to my senses fully, I found out I wasn’t really dreaming that. I hallucinated that. I would endlessly whimper and scream whenever I was awake. Even worse, it wasn’t even the medications they gave me, but I received nothing that could cause hallucinations.

I was in so much pain my brain was losing its shit on itself.

The road to physical recovery was akin to speeding on highway full quite a literal agony, with your legs serving as your car’s wheels. The worst toothache has nothing on your spine trying to murder break your psyche unwillingly with endless pain signals. My back doesn’t hurt much anymore; however, I wish it had, this way, I wouldn’t have the time to self-torment over the fact I’ve killed my own flesh and blood.

The worst part is, no one seems to even think so, no matter how much I tell them the full story of how I’ve been killing my son throughout his whole life.