tell me, can i do nothing?
@aluraze || MEMES: ACCEPTING
Millie stares into the scuff on her shoe. IT HAS BEEN A LONG DAY, will be a longer one still, the date-line long since passed in a flying box of metal and panic and tin. It is MORNING here, the same morning she’d left. That other morning, her shoes had been new. Freshly polished. She remembered the tang of the stuff clouding the hallway of her pokey cottage. NO. Couldn’t remember. Imagine? She feels as if that should be more accurate. As if twenty four hours have severed her so far from the woman she was that the memories could not possibly be the same.
So yes, maybe she is simply imagining the way that her new black shoes had click clack click clacked on the departure lounge floor.
Then everything had sounded different, far up in the air.
Shoes. The wind. Her voice, so loud on the tannoy.
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, WE’RE MAKING AN EMERGENCY LANDING. PLEASE REMAIN CALM.
And she’d been calm. Calm’s anaesthesia reaches right to her fingertips as she draws from a lit cigarette. Those hands do not SHAKE- not even now. Still as the hard ground they stand on. It’s difficult to imagine that they could ever tremble again.
A flicker of ash catches in the wind, dances prettily in front of her eyes. Around her shoulders, the silver shock blanket squeals that horrid, metallic kind of sound. Underneath it, someone is speaking.
The ash floats so gently to the floor. Millie does not hear a thing.
No. No. She is far, far away, staring at her shoes.