From prizewinning writer Joe Fassler comes a brilliant modern reimagining of the myth of Daedalus and Icarus as a story of obsession, longing, and the radical pursuit of utopia.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Joe Fassler’s The Sky Was Ours, which is out now.
It’s 2005, and 24-year-old Jane is miserable. Overworked, buried in debt, she senses the life she wanted slipping away—while the world around her veers badly off course, hurtling toward economic and ecological collapse. She wants to find something better. But she has no idea where to start.
In a sudden and unprecedented burst of rebellion, Jane decides to abandon everything she knows, leaving behind her relationships and responsibilities to go on the road. That’s how she meets Barry, a brilliant and charismatic recluse living on an isolated homestead near New York’s Canadian border. For years, in secret, Barry’s chased an unlikely obsession: to build a pair of wings humans can fly in, with designs inspired by an obscure precursor to the Wright Brothers. It’s no mere hobby. He’s convinced his dream of flight will spark a revolution, delivering us from the degradation of modern capitalism and the climate chaos that awaits us.
Jane is captivated by Barry’s radical vision, even as his experiments become more dangerous. But she’s equally drawn to the enigmatic Ike, Barry’s gentle, thoughtful son, who’s known no other reality—and who only wants to keep his father alive, tethered to ground and to reason.
So begins an inventive, dazzlingly beautiful story about the human desire for transcendence—our longing to escape the mundane and glide into a euphoric future. Inspired by the myth of Daedalus and Icarus, The Sky Was Ours is a powerful and imaginative debut that explores the question: If you had access to technology that allowed you to escape the confines of your life, would you use it? And if Barry’s wings really could change the world, would that be freedom?
The half-finished pair of wings lay naked across the worktable. The essential shape was there, but it was missing the long struts that splayed through it, holding the cloth together with the arched strength of a spider’s legs.
“We’ve got to move quickly,” Barry said, waving his hands over the network of wooden bones. “Every second matters. Because people are out there”—he gestured broadly with his hand—“and they’re waiting for us. They’ve spent their lives waiting for us, and don’t even know it.”
His limbs quivered as he moved, his body like a toy too tightly wound.
“See these?” he said, pointing to the long, skeletal pieces. “They’re willow rods—basket willow, not weeping. I’ve planted them by the river, coppices we cut back and harvest a few times a year. Enormously quick-growing. Feel it.”
I touched the rod and pulled my hand away, surprised to find it tough and subtly pliant, bouncing back into shape like the cartilage in your ear.
“Strong, right?” Barry said. “But light. And hollow, like bird’s bones. Willow rods are what Lilienthal used in his gliders, a technique overlooked completely by modern aviation. They grow naturally in the exact shape we need them to be, almost like a gift from Mother Earth. Like the world is just waiting for us to reach out and take what should be ours—the sky!”
I should have been embarrassed by such an unchecked outburst of emotion. It was such an absurd, overweening thing to say. But something seemed to happen as I watched him, that bearded man whose glasses flashed for emphasis as he spoke, whose knobby hands gestured with the intensity of an orchestra conductor. The air itself seemed to warp toward Barry as I listened, the way light bends toward a black hole.
“If we work hard enough,” Barry said, “we can finish by nightfall.”
His words thrilled me with their audacity. I wouldn’t even have to wait very long to find out if he was full of shit.
The frame itself was held to the table by a sequence of metal clamps. Barry told me to hold it steady anyway, I think just to give me something to do. Then he attacked the wood with an ancient tool, an old drill he cranked by hand. The corkscrew gradually drew shavings from the wood, filling the air with piney scent as they drifted to the floor.
For what felt like an hour, I stood there clutching the frame, watching as the shavings peeled and fell. It was clearly hard physical work. Barry gritted his teeth, his lips pulled so far back with exertion that at times I could see the mottled pink of his gums, the missing tooth at the back of his jaw. I stood there, pushing down on the wood, trying to feel like I was helping.
My shoulder blades started to ache. Then my calves started to pulse with hurt, a dull glowing soreness that spread up through the notches of my spine.
Not only that, I needed a cigarette. I needed one so bad my elbows shook and my vision blurred. I didn’t want to want a cigarette so much. But the need was there, glowing ever more brightly in my veins.
And yet I couldn’t leave. It was clear Barry wanted and expected me to stay, and the simplest thing was to obey him. So I was stuck there, a semi-willing captive, trapped the way you get trapped in a bad conversation at a party. The minutes passed, and I started feeling foolish. I could have gone anywhere that morning, and I’d opted instead to toil in a too-warm barn.
Now and then, I’d glance longingly out the double doors toward the fresh world outside. In the distance hens milled about behind their chicken-wire fence, little daubs of brown paint. And I’d catch occasional glimpses of Ike as he passed back and forth across the meadow. He never came and said hello, or even looked my way. Instead, he haunted the property, grimacing and silent, pretending we weren’t there—like Barry and I were some kind of persistent hallucination, unreal and better off ignored.
I must have watched him for an hour chopping firewood on the scarred tree stump he used for an altar, hacking logs in half, then in half again. There was something intentional and patient about his movements, as if he took pleasure in lining up the wood just so, savoring the moment before the blow. His axblows beat the morning’s rhythm, each one an interminable clock tick as time oozed along. Then he was gone.
I wanted to leave, I realized. In the fantasy that played on repeat in my head, I just walked away, leaving Barry there, breaking off in a run the second he called my name. But I just couldn’t force myself to do it, the thought of a sudden breach made worse by all that silence. By then I was so ravenous I thought I might faint. My gut started to make funny, humiliating noises, purring and growling like a pet ready to turn on its master. I hoped Barry didn’t hear. But after one especially loud stomach gurgle, he briefly looked up at me. His glasses held the light, two moons.
“Hunger is energy, my sister,” he said.
Then he threw himself back into his work, cranking away with his sad little drill.
I flushed, somehow mortified, insulted, and humbled all at once. I hated that the inner workings of my digestive system were audible, that I couldn’t hide the need I felt. But I tried to engage with the idea that hunger is energy. I tried to pretend the pain I felt was sustaining. Instead, I just felt sick. My legs ached secretly under my jeans. I was woozy and nauseous and ready to pass out.
I looked down at Barry, his forearms sweat-slick, bulging with effort as he turned the crank.
“Halfway through!” he announced. “With this hole?” I asked feebly.
He nodded. “Then it’s just eleven more to go.”
The words burst from some deep part of me, this desperate, impatient part that didn’t know what it was saying.
“Maybe there’s a faster way to do it?”
Barry put the auger down and looked intently at me. “This,” he said, resting his hand on the tool, “is a manual
bit. Why not use a power drill—that’s what you’re wondering, right?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not—”
“Electric drills wreck the grain, and fill the hole with backdraft,” he said, talking over me, his voice steadily rising. “But it’s not just that they’re reckless and imprecise tools. It’s so much more than that, my sister. What we are trying to build here is an approach we can sustain.”
He loomed over me, a rank, prickling stench rolling off him, and I shrank back. For a second I thought he might actually grab me by the shoulders and shake me. I hadn’t pegged Barry as a violent type. But the intensity in his voice was not the kind I wanted to hear from a male stranger, miles out in the woods, where I couldn’t call for help.
“The power’s going to go out one day, Jane,” he said. “You see that, don’t you? One way or another, the system’s going to fail, and leave us all in the dark. Maybe it will be because we keep attacking the planet, unleashing a catastrophe that disrupts all the conveniences of so-called civilization. Or—and this is if we’re lucky—it happens sooner, because of us.”
He picked up the drill again, rattling it for emphasis as he spoke.
“When the system fails—and either way, it will fail—electric tools become no good. Just bad props, busted hunks of steel and plastic. They depend on the power of the old world—which is not power at all, but theft, deferred debt, suicide. See what I’m saying? We’ve got to be ready. We’ve got to be able to keep working in the darkness, the second the lights go out!”
He said all this in one great rush, a speech of such sudden intensity that I could only stare. His words flooded my brain somehow, though I wasn’t quite sure what he wanted them to mean. Mostly I felt like crying, from the hunger and the strain and the rough way he’d raised his voice.
“Here,” Barry said, before I had time to think. “Don’t just stand there watching. Do!”
He opened a drawer under the worktable, pulled out another drill, and thrust it at me. It felt thick and clumsy in my hands.
“Do it,” he said. “Right here.”
He guided the tip of the corkscrew into the wood.
“Go. Hold it steady,” he said, so I began to turn. My muscles clenched, and wood filings poured away from the frame like sand.
By the time I’d finished the first hole and had moved on to the second, my hair was plastered to my forehead, to my cheeks, my sweat-damp T-shirt clinging to my ribs. It was getting hotter as the day went on, and Barry stank—sometimes I’d catch a whiff of him so strong I had to turn my face. But when I started to feel like I couldn’t go through with it, I’d look up into the upper reaches of the barn. The wings hanging from the rafters were things of otherworldly beauty, huge and intricate and light. Their strangeness, and the distance, started to play tricks with my sight, and in a delirious way they sometimes seemed like they were falling.
I looked away, through the double-wide doors again, letting the sight of the world outside restore my senses. The meadow was vividly green and lush, backed by a row of stern pines. And then, the strangest thing: a horse’s head entered the frame.
I was sure I was hallucinating.
An enormous chestnut mare walked slowly past the doorway, like a vision in a dream.
“Excuse me,” I said. “There’s a horse.” Barry looked up, his eyes radiantly blue. “Hm?” he said.
He slowly put on his glasses and looked outside. “Oh,” he said. “It’s Friday. Here—let’s go say hello.”
I followed behind him, and felt this swell of gratitude—for a break from the monotony and the physical strain, and because what I’d seen was real.
After the darkness of the barn, the meadow felt almost painfully bright, electric with life and light.
“This is Friday,” Barry said, patting the animal’s haunch.
I ran my palm along the horse’s ribs. Her muscles bristled at my touch.
“That’s a nice name,” I said.
“She comes and goes,” Barry said. “She loves the grasses here. She probably escaped from a stable somewhere, because she’ll let you ride her, and she’ll take a bit. But we mostly let her do what she wants. No one ever really owns a horse.”
The only horses I’d ever seen were the ones that clopped around Central Park pulling carriages, depressed-looking creatures that shared the road with taxis and were whisked off at night to box stalls so godforsaken they occasionally made the news. But this one was naked and gleaming, like the horses I’d loved in books from childhood.
“Come on,” Barry said, and his voice was softer then, as if the animal’s presence had somehow made him gentler. “Come with me.”
I followed him at a distance around the side of the barn, to where an old iron spout jutted from the earth, above a metal bucket.
Barry pumped the handle, and the water gushed in, ounce after ounce. I was so thirsty that I couldn’t bear to watch somehow, and glanced up at the woods. And there, at the edge of the forest, I saw something else.
A plane—or the skeleton of a plane.
It was like something from a history book—big and ancient-looking, with parallel wings held six feet apart by thin crisscrossing supports. The twin propellers had rusted still, the once-white muslin torn to rags by rain and time.
“Barry,” I said, and pointed. He looked up.
“Oh,” he said, still pumping the handle. “That.” “What is it?”
“A model of the Wright Type B Flyer,” he said. “The first commercially available aircraft the Wright brothers made. A steady, even-keeled machine. It’s a masterpiece for what it is. You could fly across the state in that plane with enough gas and good weather. I powered mine off a lawn mower engine. I used to build them.”
The water rushed into the bucket.
“I wanted to fly,” he said, “since I was very young. And when a boy wants to fly, he thinks: planes. He’s been conditioned to think in terms of planes. So when I came out here that was what I did, at first. I built planes and I flew them. I had quite a reputation with the locals, let me tell you. But I started to realize that flight could be something so much bigger and bolder than a plane. That was the last one I made. I left it there, and let the forest take it.”
The bucket was full.
“You have to be careful with machines,” Barry went on. “The things we make to serve us quickly become our masters. Choose very carefully what you want to be mastered by, Jane. Personally, I think of words from the philosopher Lao-tzu.”
His eyes flashed at me, their Bunsen-blue.
“To paraphrase,” he said, “the sharper the tools, the darker the times.”
He offered me the bucket, and I drank, my forearms straining against the weight.
It was no city tap water, tepid and inert: this kind was stunningly cold, with a molten, metallic taste I found delicious. I pulled the lip of the bucket away, gasping, and drank deeply again before I set it down.
Barry lifted the bucket to his own mouth then, slurping greedily, raining droplets from his beard.
“There,” he said. “Now, back to work.”
Somehow, my hunger was gone. I felt refreshed and full, as if I’d had a meal, and I was ready to keep going.
From THE SKY WAS OURS by Joe Fassler, to be published on April 23, 2024 by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Joe Fassler.
