Read Online Some Things About Flying by Joan Barfoot - Free Book Online Page A

around them, rippling from seat to seat, row to row, until there’s a rising, rumbling tone of horror. Some shouting. Shrieks here and there.
    Some kinds of knowledge are explosive, too big to contain. That may be why hands fly up to faces, covering ears, covering eyes: trying to prevent minds from collapsing in on themselves with this new understanding.
    Shared terror is far too real, multiplying itself automatically and uncontrollably in some wild formula maybe Tom’s younger, clever mathematical daughter could explain.
    Lila’s grandmother, telling June of some upheaval, had words for this feeling: “I’m all turned inside out,” she’d say, hands fluttering in distress like butterflies.
    Tenderly, tentatively, Lila reaches a hand to the side of Tom’s jaw, feeling bone. Gristle under the skin.
    She can’t quite feel her own skin, though. An awful, high scream rises from somewhere behind them, and Lila admires how alert that woman must be, absorbing the impact of disaster so swiftly she can scream like that.
    People are starting to move, some trying to run. Some, scattering possessions and wits, are even climbing over seats—where do they think they are going? What do they suppose they are doing? “Be still,” she wants to shout. “Everybody, shut up, please, till I can understand this.” She can’t say just what “this” is. If she could say, would that fix it, or cause it to vanish? Is her faith in words so great she believes the right one could repair?
    She hopes the members of the crew are not so foolish. Of course they’re not; naturally their faith will be in machinery, not words.
    Lila’s touch has finally reached Tom, so that his gaze shifts, it seems reluctantly, to her. “Lila?” She can’t hear him, but sees his mouth forming her name. “Lila?”
    â€œI don’t know.” She can’t tell if he can hear her. “I don’t know,” which is no answer, but then, it wasn’t truly a question.
    There isn’t time to say everything twice like that. There isn’t time, for that matter, to say everything once.
    Maybe she was wrong. Maybe everyone’s wrong. She only glanced for a second. On planes, sometimes things look wrong, or reflect in the air strangely, when nothing’s really the matter at all. On night flights, sparks in the darkness have startled her on occasion. Maybe these are only sparks in the light.
    She turns to look again. Those are not sparks. Those are flickers of flame at the edge of the wing.
    Where is fuel stored on an airplane? How could there possibly be fire out there, where the air, as she tried to tell Susie, is so intensely cold? Why isn’t someone doing something? There must be things to be done. She hopes the crew hasn’t been stricken immobile by a disbelief similar to her own.
    She turns back urgently to Tom. “This isn’t happening, is it?” Surely he could alter reality. He has altered aspects of her reality for as long as she has known him, why not now?
    â€œOh Christ,” he says. “We’re going to die.”
    What?
    She could shake and shake him. She’s had such hopes, and he’s not even trying. If he cultivated a disbelief like hers, could they not, with their combined wills, make this not be happening? Instead, such despair is in his face, along with terror.
    She reaches out again to touch his skin. At the moment, she loves and pities him to death, and it does not feel like an odd combination.
    Wait. Just wait. She is a rational person, and it’s important to know things. With facts, a person can figure out how to feel, but they are flying at the moment without critical information. Not fair.
    The running children have disappeared from the aisles. Susie is wrapped in her mother’s arms, weeping. Does she understand, or is she just upset by an explosion of adult hysteria? Nobody understands; how could Susie? Why