This snap fiction story (what’s that?) fired up its engines when I spotted an airliner overhead on a clear day…
Here’s the snap I took and the story that it taxied to the runway. Fasten your seatbelts!
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The Deep End of the Eyes
There are certain benefits to be had, thought Martha Kendiddle as she wiped the dew off a park bench, sat down, opened up a bottle of Sangiovese and sampled its somewhat disappointing contents, to occasionally being an asshole. The trick, she imagined, was recognizing both the opportunity and the benefit, and having a generally unscrupulous disposition. She had known a handful people in her life who fit that description, had fallen immoderately in love with one of them, and was, against her own better nature, entertaining the notion that it may offer some solace to watch her plane crash from the sky.
Isidora Mendicott went by Dorothy in polite conversation, had allowed Martha to settle on Izzie during their less-than-polite exchanges, would not stand for Iz under any circumstances, and insisted on wearing 5‑inch heels in public even though she was usually the tallest person in the room without them. They had met at a charity function where they were each reluctantly representing other people’s conflicting interests, but had quickly redirected their attention to a different and evidently shared interest: one another.
The evening’s entertainment had barely gotten under way when a stranger in a burgundy peau de soie pencil dress sashayed over to Martha, summarily scanned her name tag and hummed, “I beg your pardon… Ms. M. Kendiddle. You seem to be the only person who wants to get the fuck out of here even more than me. Shall we?”
Unaccustomed to such untoward attentions, Martha quickened as she sensed Izzie’s hand touching—no, feeling her arm. She looked into the deep end of the stranger’s eyes, leaned over, and plunged. In a moment of wayward release, she decided to let this majestic, brashly fluvial woman into her night and into her life.
What followed had been three weeks of intemperance without regret, succeeded by three days of remorse without clemency. What was tempestuous became bitter; what started tenderly became petrified; what seemed hewn in stone became slippery as sand.
The capricious energies of passion can be contained and recharged in love—but to be sustained, that love must learn a new, dispassionate language that grows deeper roots and suffers more inequities. Isidora Mendicott had neither the time nor the temperament to learn that gentle tongue, as Martha discovered one day when, having done to bed together, she awoke alone.
There had been no note, just the gentle clack of the door latch closing beyond the wall. At the sound of a car trunk slamming, Martha had rushed to the window, just in time to catch the last of Isidora Mendicott’s burgundy jacquard cape disappearing into a cab and the words “Terminal 4!” being barked.
And so it was that she now found herself on a park bench under the takeoff flight path, surrounded by the repulsive vigor of the early-morning joggers and the languid dependability of the first-shift dog walkers, eyeing each passing plane with dejected suspicion. There were no crashes of course, no explosions or parachutes, no sudden reversals of fortune that could abort Air Izzy’s flight to its next conquest.
There are days, thought Martha, when the world just was as it is and there’s nothing you can do. She put the bottle down. And there would come days when the world would be as unchanged as it always was, but in new ways. Tomorrow she would realize that the secret of love is that every loss is an undiscovered trouvaille; today she will wallow and gush and squirm and seethe—but if at all possible, over a stiff arabica and an almond croissant.
• • •
