Still in progress

Return Flight

From her window seat Margie watched the mountains slide beneath the plane, but her mind was on her husband, Joe, beside her. Joe crunched complimentary peanuts, loudly. Drops of condensation fell from his plastic cup onto his white shirt, slightly tinted pink from the time he had done the laundry. His glasses rested too close to the edge of his tray, Always smudged, Margie noted.
She had sighed when Joe made the taxi turn around for his forgotten luggage. She had tapped her high heel as they waited at Check-In. And when they missed their original flight and had to settle for the 2:00 to Denver Margie became deathly silent, her way of saying, This is all your fault.
“Is there a doctor on board?” a voice rang out. Panic and tension settled like an L.A. fog. Margie froze. Joe did not and knocked his glasses off his tray as he jumped up.
He moved down the aisle, quick and agile. Relief spread across the flight attendant’s face as Joe laid a silver-haired woman across two seats. He pounded the woman’s chest with efficient, knowledgeable strokes. He was calm, commanding. Margie remembered this Joe. Even his hair had lost its grey in the dim lighting.
“Thank God he’s here,” a man whispered behind Margie.
The silver-haired woman opened her eyes. There was a collective sigh of relief followed by a long applause. Joe walked back to their seat. Someone whistled. Another thumped his back. There was a firmness to his step, a glow to his eyes, which looked to Margie. See I am needed, they said. Was he surprised himself?
Margie reached for his glasses on the ground, which had broken in their fall, and gently placed them in Joe’s outstretched hand.
“We can fix this,” she said.

Resurrection

Jamie looks out the window of her one bedroom apartment at a dying tree. Leaves are snobs, dressing in their liveliest garmets, brilliant shades of amber, before greeting even humble Earth. In Jamie’s lap is a book, Myths and Fairytales for Children, a gift from a tearful worker at the pregnancy test center. She numbly thumbs through it with her right hand, while her left hand, ringless, rests on her growing, round belly. It will be the only gift her child receives.

A page catches her eye. She stops. It’s a bird, ablaze and falling to Earth.

Fire falls from the phoenix’s wings, Death to Life from ashes will spring, it says.

She vaguely recalls a story about birds or angels flying around a throne. There was something about a burning coal and holiness, too. But that wasn’t this story. Ah, church, she remembers, a place she can no longer go.

Fire drips from the tree outside, holy hotness sent by the angles to purify, falling like the phoenix.

Will this child rise from the ashes?



Funeral

Baby, Baby, she whispered wetly into my ear. She cried and hugged me as we stood beside the open coffin. She wrapped her arms around my back and brushed my hair away with her sweaty palm. She enveloped in her embrace, and she nearly kissed me when she spoke. I didn’t really even know her. I tried to cry. I thought it might help.

It’s going to be okay, she said.

I didn’t know why she was telling me this; it was her brother.

She was eleven, and so was I.
This was our first experience with death.