skotta

She starts talking to me out of the blue. Adolescently awkward, dark eyeliner, low-cut jeans, her arms folded around the pillow she's brought with her. The case is printed with characters from an animated film. I am sure she is fifteen until she mentions her husband.

She is going back to Indiana. She doesn't want to go. She had so loved being up there. The best place she'd been. She says something about her husband and the base and another thing I don't catch at all, though it might have been about deployment. She shows me a bruise on her wrist and tells me about her father. Am I more a religious person or a spiritual person? She used to be really into Wicca, but not anymore. She tells me about her wedding dress and about what her in-laws said.

We are hurtling through the air, and still everything seems airless: nothing holding up the plane and nothing inside to breathe.

We stop in Anchorage. The mountains are just fading out of dark blue visibility into charcoal and blackness. We'll be on the same flight onward, she says, but meanwhile she's going to the lounge. She's military, so she gets to wait in the lounge.

When we board again, I do not see her.