A Fear of Flying

I tell myself:
I’m not afraid of flying. I’m
confidently lounging
in the three extra inches that
the reclining seat gives me.
I’m not at all afraid.

Here we go, the airplane’s leveling out
and the early morning city lights are stars
embedded in the ground, then layered over with clouds.
The airplane slices up and through stars
embedded in the sky. It’s four in the morning and
I’m not at all afraid.

My mind casually drifts out the window
along the swell of the clouds. It’s peacefully white.
I think of heaven until I realize the stars are gone.
I tell myself: I’m not afraid of flying—
but this time I’m lying.

What’s that movie, with the plane crash
and the premonition? That one where death
reaches out past the wreck? It’s bloody and painful,
and I’m not afraid (I think)—but I close my eyes anyway,
tight enough for stars to appear on my eyelids.
I’m not afraid, but the morning light is getting stronger.
My eyelids are flesh colored and stretched tightly against
the light coming in the window, and in the distance, somewhere up in my forehead,
I see a plane crashing into the ground.

It’s skidding, digging up a long row in the concrete behind it.
There’re houses, and cars on the street, and large metal plates
that used to be wings, but now are smoldering hot knives
gashed into the side of what used to be a kitchen on one side, and
a bedroom on the other. The bottom of the plane is gone,
my seat is skidding into the gash. My feet
are skidding into raw, shoeless, soleless, skinless messes.
I think: We’re going to crash.

Or did we already?

My head hurts.

I’m not afraid. I try to stand up. My feet
are slippery—wet. I lean over the body next to me, and
in a fit of amusement, pull the elastic of the hanging oxygen mask
around his head. Not that he is breathing. And since he doesn’t care,
I use his shoulder for a support as I gingerly make my way through rubble.

The lady sitting in front of us is dead too. And her small son.
Across the aisle, there’s another set of bodies.
I keep checking until it’s obvious that everyone is dead,
peacefully in their seats. A bit blood spattered, but they probably didn’t feel a thing.

It’s quite a bit lighter outside by the time I give up circling
the block of smoking, demolished houses, looking for a person to talk to.
The sun is centered in the sky. I go back to my seat and
wonder when death is going to take me with the others.

I think: If I go home, am I going to slip on a wet kitchen floor,
or get run over by a lawn mower? Will the wounds in my feet get infected
and poison my blood? Will lightning strike my car off an overpass
as I drive to work? Will it hurt? Could it be worse than this?

I reach under my seat. My bag is still there for some reason.
My nail file is right where I left it. I take a long look at my arm before
bracing it against my leg and sawing a long thread along my vein.
“It’s harder than it looks, isn’t it?” I say to the dead guy next to me.
He turns away from his magazine to look at my arm and says,
“What are you talking about?”

“This,” I say, driving the point of the file under the skin and down
at an angle. He starts screaming for a flight attendant and won’t stop,
even after I tell him they’re all dead. My arm hurts a lot, but I keep sawing away
as fast as I can. Bleeding and breathing slower and slower until I can’t stand to breathe
anymore. I’m bleeding and suffocating in the clouds forming against the window.
“Stop screaming,” I beg him. “You’re dead.”

He screams one more time before a flight attendant shows up.

I’m too tired to deal with the dead anymore so I lean my head on my shoulder
to look through the window. The clouds are white and quiet,
and they remind me of heaven.