You Fly Coach
You fly coach. He snores like a dropped sack of quarters.
The other one keeps restarting his laptop with the same effort as a college freshman trying to unwrap a condom with sweaty hands and two roommates and a set of IKEA extra-long twin sheets itching his bare ass.
They both use the armrests like a drunk uses a public urinal.
The girl is 12D has a cherubic ass and long hair that twists back onto itself like ivy on redbrick dormitories.
The steward takes short breaths. The other steward takes his time when he smiles, as if he's raising his head to see the 4 am metro approaching before the sun's risen.
The stewardess doesn't fuck around. The stewardess asks nicely for the third time and gives the look that says, I make my nieces two-egg omelettes every morning and iron their socks with the little skirts around the top and pleat their ratty hair they refuse to brush and let me assure you that at the age of 7 and 9, respectively, they are far less of a pain in the ass than you are being right now.
He snores again. This time it's like someone socked him in the windpipe. You contemplate actually doing it.
The girl in 22A sleeps with her head back against her spine and her mouth open so she looks like a fur seal in a National Geographic Channel show. She looks like she plays, or played, or will play field hockey at some point in her life.
The window is open and you can see Nevada. You see lakes and you think, Wow, who knew Nevada had lakes? and then you think that was a stupid question and then you just watch the sunrise in fast motion.
You want the girl in 12D to stand up again but the steward with the slow smile is handing out cups of Coke, only the cup, yeah, sorry, we don't do the whole can anymore, I know, it is, I know, yeah, I'm sorry.
The pink shirt in the exit row is reading the Economist on his phone and rifling through his ten dollar Supercut with cracked nails and fat fingers and dark eyelids that would get you called a wop and pushed around a little back home in Boston.
He snores again. He turns away and rolls his forehead into the fake leather and starts to dream about kneading bread and cutting rosemary stems with kitchen shears and will wake up not wanting to drink coffee and instead drink Earl Grey like he used to at Willamette before he switched to Econ and made English Literature his minor, then his concentration, then his hobby, then a story he told about a time in college. He is also wearing cargo pants.
You look out the window again. Nevada has mountains too, apparently, though maybe it's Colorado, but you can't remember the order of all the boxy states out West.
In three hours, you'll land and the pilot will apologize.
You'll pass 22A and her sore neck, and pink shirt and his oversized class ring, and 12A and her Levi's backpack, and you'll ride the train and squint at the sun and trace the ghosts it makes under your eyes.
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