Plane

Molly woke up with a small smile at half past five. She was used to waking up this early to get to the school where she taught had taught for two years now. She had gotten the job pretty soon after college, and considered herself very lucky to have it.

Today, though, she had a flight from here in Boston over to California. She wasn’t too exited about going to the conference, but she didn’t complain. So she laid in bed for another fifteen minutes. Molly was not the type of person who habitually laid in bed for a long time after waking up, and boredom soon overtook her.

Molly got up and took a shower. Being the type of person who does not like to waste inordinate amounts of time, she got out quickly and dried off equally fast, whistling quietly to herself, going from one tune to the next as her mind took her. On her way out of the bathroom, she glanced at the clock, which read five after six.

Molly had started packing a small bag a few days before, and had fine tuned it sporadically up until now, so she had little packing left to do. Nevertheless, the usual details that had been nothing but specks of light on the road ahead had turned into blinding flashes immediately in front of her.

She checked that she had really packed everything, and then checked again. Satisfied that everything was safely stowed in her bag, Molly headed for the kitchen. Holding a box of crackers in one hand, using the other to eat the crackers, she stood in front of the cupboard looking for something for breakfast. After a few minutes, she shut the cupboard and went to the fridge, eating crackers all the while. She decided that she wasn’t all that hungry, and she would just grab something at the airport.

She returned the crackers to their original location inside the cupboard and checked the time. It was half past seven, so she grabbed her small bag and headed down, out of her building, and onto the street. Once on the street, Molly flagged down a taxi to take her to the airport. There was no reason to park her car there and pay some ungodly fee. Best to just take the taxi.

Being a teacher, she always had something to grade, so she pulled out a stack of work and a light blue pen. She preferred it to the overused red ink that so many teachers seemed to use. Some of her colleagues prided themselves on the fact that they would use nothing but red. Molly, however, had several different colors that she was prone to using, light blue being the instrument of choice for today.

The drive went by, as all drives eventually do, and soon the car reached the airport. Molly had not the slightest idea as to the time, but knew that to ask would only waste more of it. She made her way through the various obstacles put in place to stop people from getting to their flights and made it to her terminal just as her row was called to board.


“Ed, get up. We’re going today.” They only had a few hours, and if Ed was moving this slowly, there was no way they would get to the airport on time.

“Edward! Get up now! We don’t have time for this. We have to get out of here
in one hour and we have no time for delays.”

“Jane, can you ever just relax? It’s six in the morning. We have four hours before the flight leaves, and you know how these places are. We’ll probably have to wait another hour or two before they even let us on.”

So Jane went fuming off to take her shower. She knew that he would still be in bed by the time she got back, but Ed was just so stubborn sometimes. She took a fast shower, thinking of all of the things that she had to do before they left, and all of the things she had done already. She was trying so hard to make this vacation go smoothly for everyone, but he was just so uncooperative sometimes.

She was wrong. Ed had made coffee and put on water for Jane’s tea, and was waiting for her to get out of the shower so he could have his turn. He had just done it to spite her, she decided.

Ed tried, he really did. But Jane was just so irritable sometimes that she just couldn’t see how hard he did try to make her happy. It just seemed that whenever he did something, he did it wrong. There was no way to win. She hadn’t always been like this. Jane was just restless now that the kids were all off on their own, running their own lives.

By the time he got out, she was done with breakfast, busy with all of the last minute details that were all threatening to destroy the planet at once. No matter how much planning you put in, they still surface, so why bother? Ed grabbed a bowl of cereal and watched her putting everything together. He tried to help when he finished, but he just seemed to get in the way.

Despite the overwhelming forces of chance, Ed and Jane were in their car, pulling ot of the driveway at half past seven. The closer they got to the airport, the happier they became, and soon they were chatting like newlyweds going on their honeymoon. Newlyweds with gray hair.

Ed showed his wife the empty spot on his belt where his cell phone was usually clipped, and smiled. Jane had wanted this to be a vacation with no interruptions from work. Ed was making sure that Jane would get what she wanted.

They arrived at the airport with plenty of time, checking their bags at eight and wandering in and out of the various stores that had taken up residence in the airport. Ed and Jane were happier with each other’s presence than they had been since their youngest had left home a little over six months ago.

They walked hand in hand towards their terminal. Their shared good mood wasn’t even hindered by the security check, and it even wore off on the guards who smiled and didn’t give the two any undue fuss. They sat down in the terminal and talked quietly about their vacation together. They had always wanted to go to California, and they were finally going.

Despite Ed’s prediction of horrible two hour delays, their row was called on time and they boarded the plane hand in hand, the morning’s tension completely behind them.


James woke up early. Not very early, but earlier than usual. With his new job in software, he had a lot more control over his hours. He had a flight to California that was leaving at ten that morning. The airline was telling travelers to get to the airport a few hours early, so James woke up at six and was ready to go by seven. He made sure to leave himself three hours to get to the airport and deal with everything, which left him with exactly the two hours that the airline had recommended, if the trip to the airport took an hour. Just to make sure he made the flight.

James was flying from his hometown of Boston to California to visit relatives on his father's side. He hadn’t seen most of them in years, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to now. His father’s family had disapproved of the software industry, and of James’ job in it. He couldn’t see what was wrong with either his job or the industry itself, so he went ahead with his education at the cost of a few relationships that had been tenuous at best over the years.

Like every morning, James started the coffee machine in the small kitchen of his equally small apartment and took a fast shower while the coffee machine did its part to wake him up, both by the caffeine and by the smell that drifted into the bathroom from the kitchen. It was the smell of life, and it gave James life. One cup of life-juice every morning.

James grabbed his bag on the way out the door. It was right where he had put it the night before, next to the door with his shoes and a comfortable sweatshirt for the plane. It would be a brief stay, so he only needed a small duffel with a few sets of clothing and a toothbrush. It was still only seven in the morning, so he still had plenty of time.

Out on the street, James flagged down a cab and climbed inside. His bag was small enough that he could throw it in the back seat and not cause any problems, so he did. He shut the door and said to the driver, “Logan Airport,” as though he was asking if the driver knew where it was, or even of the place’s existence. The driver merely nodded and pulled back into traffic, back into what James viewed as the racing circuit that so many drivers think that they are on.

The radio was on softly, set to a local FM station. It took James a while to notice. When he did, the song brought him back to a different time and place. It was a place that he did not want to return to. A place that he tried to forget. Everyone has their secrets, great and small. Some have more than others, some have less. Some can hide behind an inscrutable mask, some can create a new face that reveals something not quite the truth but not really not the truth, and some just can not hide their secrets at all.

The ride to the airport took an hour and ten minutes, cutting into the two hours he had allotted for navigating the airport and getting through security, but he wasn’t overly irritated. He managed to get through to the terminal with half an hour to spare, so the ten minutes really didn’t matter in the end. He had packed a book for the flight. It was a new one, about new uses of old technology to accomplish more on a tight budget. As his department received a relatively small amount of funding, this seemed like a good book to read. At five past ten, his row was called and he boarded the plane.


Robert staggered across the room of his studio apartment and started hitting the top of the alarm clock with the heel of his hand, still too asleep to find the right button. He kept hitting it until the ungodly thing stopped. Then he sank to the floor, curled up like a dog, and tried to wake himself up. After a few minutes, he gained enough control of his motor functions to rise shakily to a standing position. Robert stared blearily at the clock, not comprehending what he saw. After a few seconds, he realized that the time was six thirty. In the morning.

Robert couldn’t remember why he had set the alarm, and began the arduous journey back to bed. As he came closer, he saw his ticket on the table next to the bed. It was only then that he remembered. He had a flight to California. Some event or something his paper wanted him to see. Robert wandered to the kitchen that graced one side of his studio, put a cup of water in the microwave and retrieved the instant coffee mix from the cabinet above the microwave. What was it he’d called it in that column? It was coming back to him now. He’d called it life-juice.

As he waited for the water to heat up, he sorted through yesterday’s mail. He
casually threw it into three separate piles. The trash pile, the good pile, and the bad pile. He didn’t really know what was good and what was bad, but he could usually make a good guess by looking at the return address. He said out loud to himself, “It’s really more the trash pile, the people-I-want-to-hear-from pile, and the people-I-don’t-want-to-hear-from pile, isn’t it.”

Robert drank his cup of coffee in one go and put another cup of water in. He wasn’t used to getting up at six thirty. He was used to getting up whenever he wanted to. He would write his weekly column with the local paper, write his own fiction work, eat, sleep, and do whatever he wanted with whoever he wanted whenever he wanted to do it. People had been trying to get Robert to get in line and keep his head down his entire life. The only people who didn’t want that to happen, besides himself, were his editors at the local paper. He was exactly what they wanted, and he had showed up at the exact right time. Call it luck. Call it fate. Call it whatever you want. He drank his second cup of coffee just as fast as his first.

Then, feeling awake at last, he took a fast shower and threw some clothes into a bag. He left quickly, and managed to get out the door by quarter past seven. He started walking in the direction of the airport, realized he wouldn’t have time, and flagged down a cab.

He climbed in with his bag in his hands, put the bag next to him, and said, “How about the airport. Can you believe it? I’m going to California for three days, and I’m miserable about it.”

The driver, happy to have a friendly passenger, said, “I’d love to go to California. They got great weather out there. And decent beaches. We got nothing out here.”

“Nasty traffic. Can we get there by nine, or is that gone already?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll get you there.” The driver decided that the passenger was fairly likable, and they got along fine.

The two talked like friends the entire way to the airport, and arrived at eight thirty. They bid goodbye, probably never to meet again in this city of six hundred thousand people, but they parted as friends.

Robert made it to the terminal about five minutes before his row was called to board. He didn’t have a watch, so he didn’t know exactly, but it didn’t matter all that much to him. And so Robert boarded the plane.

At the end of the flight, after the landing, when the various passengers were allowed to get up and pull themselves together, Robert looked around him and wondered what their mornings had held for them all. Who they were. Why they were flying on this same plane together, Companions for six hours and nothing more. And he knew that they would probably never be gathered together again. But, he realized, they had all made it to their destination in the end.