by Maureen Langloss
after the Sylvia Plath poem of the same title
When the bumper of a car going forty miles per hour hits the hip of a five-year-old moving slow, she does not drop under the tires. She is not crushed. She flies, sails. A perfect arc over the wide eyes of the driver, over the dirty windshield, over hood and trunk and wheel. The car passes beneath her, a grimy river. She lands head, back, feet against concrete. Head: shaped like an egg. Back: black and blue. Feet: motionless. She wonders why her mother isn’t there. She worries that the doctor can see her underwear. She asks, please, please, for a pillow when they set her body on the X-ray table.
***
If I sit just so, hands spread like feathers. If I gulp the air in in in, lungs like gills. If I synchronize my heart, beat beat like 500 knots. I can sit on the wing of an airplane at 20,000 feet and ride it like a lioness.
***
When that skinny five-year-old returns from the rehab hospital, walks the jetway to the plane, it is like traveling through the birth canal in the wrong direction. She finds her seat near the window beside the wing. She tightens her safety belt. Tight, tighter. Her breath stutters. There is no air to force words out. Afterward, the stewardess tells her mother: this child should never fly again.
***
If I remove my goggles just before dawn, if the plane climbs to 30,000 feet with me upon its wing, I will know the blue that fish know, a liquid blue. A sweet blackened blue I feel, not see, against my irises.
***
When that child, adult now, boards another plane, for love, she takes half an Ativan. Then another. The doctor gave her five. She saves the rest in case there’s a return. She grips the medicine bottle, lies her cheek on the open tray table. She wants a pillow but cannot lift her head to ask. The slightest motion will bring them down. Fuselage. Black box. Bone. Still, there’s no solace in stasis. She whispers: I’m going to die. The water inside her points down, aches to return to its source.
***
If the wind at 35,000 feet is strong enough to unpeel clothes, to wrest cap from head, I become an arrow—naked and strong and wild. I point toward my future. I rush to it with wings wide, with mouth open. Swallowing, swallowing.
***
When the woman gives birth, she sees words rise from her body like ghost clouds. I’m going to die. Die. Her teeth chatter. Grind. A hurricane inside her. She vomits as the baby emerges. Afterward, they set her, a heavy husk, into the wheelchair. They lower the pink infant onto her lap. The baby’s head: an egg. A nurse pushes mother and child down, down the long hallway. The wheels rotate too many times. Wait, she wants to say. Wait. The baby will fall. Will die. Slow down. Slow. I’ll drop her. Head then back then feet. But the blue walls of the corridor fly by, and she wonders why her mother isn’t there.
***
If I look in the porthole beside the wing, inside the cabin where the passengers sit, safety belts fastened, I see their faces, panicked and blurry. They point at me on my metal perch—cover mouths, scream, scrunch foreheads. I am their monster. Their threat. I place my palm on the dirty glass and peer into the eyes of the woman with her head on the tray. I won’t bring you down, I say. See my feathers? My gills? I’m flying with you. Swimming. But she cannot understand.
***
When the woman who flew over the car flies over the country to introduce baby to grandmother, she does not take Ativan, she remains alert. Ready to catch a fall. The baby’s insistent cry does not drown out the familiar refrain. I’m. She covers her child with blankets. Going. Tucks them tight. To. As if cotton could protect against rapid descent. Die. When the child sleeps, the woman sleeps too. She dreams of a great tsunami, its arms reaching up to the clouds, coming for her and her swollen belly. She dreams she is pregnant. A feeling of suffocation wakes her. Hypoxia. She gasps, and the flight attendant brings her a glass of water. She is thirsty and the water is cold and fresh.
***
If the wind rushes so hard it might break me, I might want the breaking. I might want the pieces of me to melt into the current. Head. Back. Feet. I am no longer afraid. I am exhilarated. I’m going to live, I shout to the passengers inside the cabin. Going to live, I shout to the thin, gusting wind. To live, I whisper to the mothers who came before me, as I crouch low, spring hard, fly directly at dawn’s bloodshot eye.
Maureen Langloss is a lawyer-turned-writer living in New York City. She serves as the Flash Fiction Editor at Split Lip Magazine. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cutbank, Gulf Coast, The Journal, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. She received the Copper Nickel Editor’s Prize for Prose in 2020. Her work appears in the 2019 Best Small Fictions anthology and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Find her online at maureenlangloss.com or on Twitter @maureenlangloss.
