Read Online Flight by Darren Hynes - Free Book Online

arms hanging lazily at his sides, and the huge amount of space he covers with each step.
    She touches her forehead, feeling the heat in her fingers, thinking that people reveal so much about themselves just by sauntering up the road or down to the store. Not hard, for instance, to notice Terry’s indecisiveness. Or Kent’s boldness. What does she give away, she wonders? Is fear there every time her heels strike the pavement? Worry, in her bowed head? Regret, in the way her eyes stay on the space in front of her feet?
    In her mind’s eye, she sees Kent’s other walk. Most people just have the one, but not him. This one is slower, deliberate, like a cat about to pounce. A bend in each elbow and the furrowed brows and the chin pointed downward.
    â€œEmily?”
    She looks up. Terry’s standing in front of her. “Oh.”
    He’s holding out a bottle of Evian. “You okay?”
    She nods, embarrassed that she missed hearing his footsteps.
    He hands the water over. “Best to keep hydrated if you’re sick.”
    As she makes her way through the ‘Employee Only’ door, she hears him say, “
    â€œTake lots of breaks.” And, “There’s a sweater on the chair in my office if you find it chilly.”
    She passes through the cluttered back room, narrowly avoids banging her shin against a pail of dirty water sitting in the middle of the floor. Before continuing on, she puts her Evian on the floor between her feet and then searches her pocket for one of the packages of Halls. Rips it open and pops one into her mouth. It tastes like cough syrup. She lets the lozenge slip beneath her tongue before picking up her water and starting down the stairs.
    * * *
    SHE PICKS UP THE NEARLY FILLED-OUT INVENTORY LIST, bringing it close to her face. Notices that the five she’d marked in the box across from the Carnation Milk looks more like a squiggle. The seven, across from the Chef Boyardee, is even worse, as if a Parkinson’s sufferer wrote it. There are other numbers she can’t make out at all. Is that a nine beside the Kraft Dinner, or a four?
    Putting the list aside, she clasps her hands together in order to stop them from trembling. Tries to slow her breathing. Shoots a look towards the stairs, half expecting to see Kent walking down them.
    She’s just swallowed the last of her first package of Halls, her throat numb now instead of sore. The three Tylenol she took earlier are making her feel light-headed, like she’s floating a few inches off the floor. The coolness of the basement, she thinks, is keeping her fever in check.
    Again her eyes go to the stairs – “Stop it,” she says to herself. “Just stop it.”
    She stands up, starts walking towards Terry’s office. He’s left his door wide open, as usual. It’s dark inside, the air a mixture of burnt coffee and black licorice. Near his desk, she fumbles about for the lamp switch. At last she finds it. The light casts an eerie glow against the far wall.
    She walks around his desk and, before taking a seat in Terry’s swivel chair, drapes his knitted sweater over her shoulders. There’s a lever on the side of the chair that adjusts its height, reclines it either forward or backward. He prefers to sit forward and high up.
    Not a picture on his desk. No mother or father, no siblings, no girlfriend, not even a dog or a cat. Pries into her business all he wants, Terry does, but doesn’t say a word about his own family life. All she knows is he was born in Corner Brook, and that his parents divorced when he was still a youngster, his father off with some young thing down in Florida somewhere, his mother living alone in the house where he was raised.
    He moved here not even five years ago. People leave , they don’t come, she’d thought back then when he’d waved to her from the front window of the old dance hall. Had it renovated in a few months, then changed