Flight

Flight
A SHORT STORY BY MICHAELA CATALANO

I am eye to eye with the horizon and the beaten wing hung south into empty sky. There waits below me an earth-choked world shattered with fog.

In the terminal I sat alone watching endings. The air was cool and sterile. I felt as though in a hospital, but hung with a different sort of unright, the sort of unright that fills eyes rather than hollows them out. A man and woman stopped walking and he set his bags against a plastic sign. They became as close as they could in their context and each time he would break away and then return, not quite running, and prolong his relevance. My friend laughed each time. I laughed and in my stomach there was a different pain than I expected.

I have not paid to view the in-flight movie on my previous nine flights and I will not pay this time. I have held the minus side of the brightness switch on my armrest until the screen in front of me is dark. I sit and read from a book you will not see as I do.

My friend left with little ceremony. As I stood in the security line she appeared and said that she was leaving. I said okay. She did not say goodbye and I did not say goodbye, and she was gone. I looked to where the man and woman had stood together before they at last broke in truth and I could not decide if I was glad that I was leaving little behind or not. In the security line I was smiled at by someone whose honesty made him real.

Someone's child is crying, a faltering pure sound that has in it all of the things that the complex keep unspoken: I want. I need. I am not okay. I shift in a seat that is growing slightly painful and turn my head to the left where high hills rest low and sinuous. I look to my hands. They seem small and pale and streaked with blue. I cannot hold them steady unless they rest on my legs.

I sat by the gate and read and listened to they who would find themselves with me in flight. I felt that if I was truly known to them not one would find me something they could not hate, and I lowered my eyes and hated and picked at a small dark bite on my wrist.

I awake from a sudden sleep. The overhead air vent is cold and burning at my scalp and I fumble and wrench it away. Something rises with unshakable familiarity and I sit swallowing until I know and I unbuckle and rise with it and find to the restroom and wait behind others and know I will and then grow wider of eye and stumble down the aisle as sound muffles and sparking night opens over the passengers and seats and I strive through a dime of vision for my seat number and collapse and hold my head in my hands and wait until I am close again to normal. The man next to me asks are you okay. I speak.