Crash '85

The Teller

James is asleep, and dreaming of dreaming of a beautiful girl.

He had spoken to her as they were boarding the airplane- or, she had spoken to him, her voice weary while he watched her lugging a suitcase as well as a flat, black bag. But he doesn’t know why he’s thinking of luggage when she had had hair like a flame and the face of an angel, of something excitingly better than an angel.

In this dream, James wakes up. The plane is cold. His coat has a hole in the elbow, and the engine yells. He looks around him, and, strangely, nobody else on the plane has a face. They’re stiff, wearing all the same gray get-ups; and though he can’t see their eyes jumping around or their mouths quirking, he can tell they are displeased. Either to be on the plane, or to be around him. He feels sick from the thought that it is more likely the second one, the sick he’d get as a kid when his swingset shook.

In this dream, James stands up, and scoots past the body next to him. His knees brush the body, which just grunts and flops around like a mannequin underwater. James frowns.

In this dream, James is watching the lights on the ceiling dim, listening to his shoes brush the blue carpet. He looks up from where he’d been watching a plastic water bottle rolling between seats, and he sees her.

In this dream, she sees him. She does not dodge his gaze like last time, she looks him in the eye. Her cheeks are pink with sleep and her fingers are shaking from the chill. James keeps his hands in his pockets, and doesn’t notice when the engine quiets.

In this dream, James steps towards her and says, “James.” He holds his hand out. She looks at it, and then at his face. And she smiles.

In this dream, she holds her own hand out, and says, “Lily.”

The two look at each other, and somewhere in the world, something falls into place. James is about to say something more, when the floor beneath them jerks, Lily grabs for his shoulder- and he wakes up. Lily is nowhere to be found, and the people around him look much as they had in his dream.

The Nomad

Vance is alone. And though it’s odd, he doesn’t not like it. He has spent much of his life alone, and though he doesn’t like that, he is used to it.

Anyways- this time, it feels different. Instead of being at the end of the dinner table, ignored; or, in his bedroom with the door locked as his baby sister becomes not so much of a baby anymore; he’s just alone, unworried.

Vance looks out the window for ocean and turquoise sky, and maybe the sun, if he could be lucky enough; how Vance loves the sun; but it’s dark. No stars, no clouds, nothing but black, like a puddle of ink; or old blood, dark and thickened.

Vance looks around, thinking that strange. His cabin is bright, and warm- closer to hot, now, he thinks. It’s unusually warm for an airplane, and Vance decides that he must just need rest. 

He knows he’s dreaming now; he knows closing his eyes in such a place as a dream will only wake him up to such a place as life; but he’s scared. Before he can do much of anything, though, an explosion sounds behind him. The walls around him start to break apart, and Vance thinks that he must close his eyes, he must wake up on his own accord.

But he cannot.

As he looks around, frantically, for something to help, he sees a red door directly across from him. Its green-paned windows glow with orange from the hallway lamp, and the dog barks, and his grandmother laughs.

Vance stumbles to the door, his face wet and his eyes blurry. He had worried, as he was stepping between tipping aisles, that as he got closer the door would disappear or the sounds of home would quiet. They hadn’t. Vance is going home.

He puts his hand on the door knob- his fingers knotted and old, so much different from his sixteen-year-old hands that had last touched it- and steps through it. And he falls, into the black, into the blood.

The Doomed

Carol cannot feel a lot. She knows she hasn’t always been that way- but when she thinks of that version of herself, the hopeful one, it’s more like she’s watching a tape than a memory. She knows she hasn’t always been this way, yet she feels the opposite, as if she were born dull. 

Flying makes this only stronger. Surrounded by people who she cannot help but envy, deep in her core, because it feels near impossible to be worse off than she is.

An old woman next to Carol moves her shaking head towards her. She glances at the cigarette between her fingers, and smiles. She closes her eyes and breathes in, deeply, before leaning back to sleep.

Carol leans past her, fumbling the cigarette to her other hand. She sees that in the seats across from her, there is a family looking at her as the old woman had. Queasy smiles, like they pity her, yet are proud of her. She watches them, and they too lean back and doze off, grins still plastered like cutouts on their faces.

She realizes, suddenly, that she’s dreaming- and she feels a bit stupid, having only just now figured it out. A dream is not a terrible place to be, though.

Not a long while later, her cigarette now just a stub, the dream begins to lose its pleasantness- Carol’s thumbing her lighter, and the plane is crashing. 

The lights are sparking, some alarm somewhere is screaming. Nobody wakes. Something blows outside her window, and Carol pulls it closed. She falls back and breathes. Her chest is aching more than ever, yet even that feels small, and insignificant. Nothing will ever be as it was.

The Artist

Lily is asleep, and dreaming of dreaming of a ridiculous boy.

He had bumped into her as they were boarding, offering her nothing but a gawking look while she mumbled and apologized for nothing. She felt quite like she could hate him, yet he was in her head all the same.

In this dream, Lily wakes up, startled with numb hands. She looks around and tucks her hands into her sleeves; upset at the cold, needing to move. Smoke a bit in the toilet, maybe. She’s never been one for smoking, but she’d bought a pack in the airport, hungry and irritated. It all feels worthless now.

In this dream, everybody is asleep. Lily waits a bit. She coughs, loudly, into her elbow. Nobody wakes, and she notices a hole in her jumper.

In this dream, Lily gives up, and continues down the aisle slowly, looking for somebody as awake as her. For a moment, she wonders if they’re even alive, with the way all their heads are lolled. 

In this dream, no one is awake, save for one boy.

In this dream, she stops walking, shocked to the point of stillness. He walks towards her, regaining mobility sooner than she- damn him- and he looks at her with a smile like she’s done something, when all she’s done is stand and stare.

In this dream, he pushes his glasses up, and says, “James.”

In this dream, Lily must be crazy, because she smiles and tells him her name and shakes his hand. It’s warm, and his eyes look like home.

In this dream, the fact that she could think such a thing is absurd, and she is about to pull her hand away when her feet are knocked out from under her as the cabin begins to shake. She lunges for James, and his mouth opens, and she wakes up. James is not there, and she wants to feel relieved, but all she feels is lost.

The Pilot

Mick’s mother had told him that he could be anything.

He remembers every time she’d said it to him, but most of all, the memory of his tenth birthday. They’d been on the carpet with a cupcake between them on the coffee table. It was dark and the icing was melting in the night heat.

She had looked at him and told him that he had a brilliant mind, and her thumb had been cold on his cheek. “You can be anything, Micky. A writer, the president, the best president there ever was.” Then she whispered, “You could fly planes. You could be a pilot, Mick. Anything.”

Often, the most prominent part of that night felt like the way the streetlights had made her eyes glow orange, like wedges of sunshine. Often, Mick would wonder how his ten-year-old self had felt about his mother’s eyes of sunshine, whether or not he had always been this way. Terrible and sad, sad and terrible, about everything.

Mick became a pilot. Mick has been around the world, and back again. Mick thinks of his mother always. Mick doesn’t know why he still feels like he does.

The sky is dark purple, dotted with stars, like flicks of a paintbrush. The co-pilot lays limp and glassy-eyed, nameless now, badge torn to pieces in the bottom of his pocket. Mick stands up, pulls his eyelids closed, and leaves.

He’s always been quiet, his mother would say so. But now is really the only moment he’s noticed it, how when he’s walking it’s as if he’s not really there.

Looking down the aisles, through the seats, Mick feels a bit of pleasure that all of these people he sees are seeing the same sky. Maybe it’s making them happy- he watches a girl startle awake and look out of her window, before pulling it shut. She sucks a cigarette and closes her eyes again. Mick wonders if she’ll care.

Maybe it’s making the man asleep in the center row happy. Well, he wakes up after a moment, and puts a hand over his mouth. A tear seeps down between his fingers. He will certainly care.

Maybe it’s making the red-haired girl and the boy with glasses happy. Though, they aren’t seeing much of anything but each other, it seems like. Mick stops and thinks that wherever they end up, it must be together, and they must get the chance to see such a sky again. He almost wants to care, for he knows they will.

He watches them all- the smoky girl, the crying man, the two that are starting to fall, in so many more ways than one. He watches them, and he feels it all begin to crash. Everything’s going down. Everything’s going bad. Worse, somehow. 

Yet the sky is still purple, and Mick still does not feel anything.