l a p s e

the moment

I awoke in a small clearing. It wasn't so much a clearing as an area that had been cleared, probably by some brutish animal that I'd encounter if I stayed there too long.

It was easy to get up. I don't know why I'd expected it to be hard. It's just something you feel after disaster, something that pushes you back down, tells you that you shouldn't try to be normal yet. After I was rescued, I stayed in bed for days.

When I sat up, leaning on my hands in the mossy wet earth, the first thing I noticed was an upside-down plane seat. I noticed the pattern only then, with a kind of detached fascination. It was a kind of swirly design. Yellow whorls and a red background. Fuzzy. Plain. The seat had fallen right onto a branch, and it had been speared right through where someone would put their head. Stuffing spilled from the burst.

A sick kind of warning.

The forest around me was foreign. Of course it was; I'd never been in a forest before. The ground was wet and sludgy and I would have wiped my hands on my jeans, except they were covered in mud, too. When I brought my hands up to my face I found the same sludge on my cheeks and my chin and on the tip of my forehead and in my hair. It was absolutely everywhere, and I hated it.

The second thing I noticed was a small, red suitcase. It wasn't mine, but I crawled over to it anyway, desperate for something. Maybe I wanted a fresh set of clothes. Maybe I wanted a cell phone. Maybe I wanted Dorothy's stupid silver shoes so I could knock the heels three times and be back home in an instant.

When I opened it, I only found only one of those things, and to my dismay, it was not the silver shoes. It was a man's suitcase, and it had boring man things in it: shaving cream, underwear, something ripped and denim.

Finally I managed to find a shirt that looked small enough. I don't think it was the man's; it could have been an extra or a gift for a kid or a skinny friend. Whatever it was I was glad for it, and even though I was probably alone, I still covered my chest when I changed.

I rummaged through the suitcase again, but there was nothing much useable in it. Somewhere in the front pocket I found a pen, and I put it in the waistband of my jeans, just in case I could somehow salvage my journal. I zipped the suitcase up and was going to leave it there until I realized there could be survivors who'd need the shaving cream and the underwear and the oversized jeans. The owner could even be walking around the wreckage looking for it.

I lugged the suitcase through the trees in an arbitrary direction. I didn't know where I was going but somehow it was the right way and in what seemed like seconds the smoking wreck of the plane was in front of me. Around it were seats in ones and twos and threes, on their back and on their sides and at first I thought they were bodies, all curled up in death.

There weren't any actual bodies that I could see. In fact the whole place seemed to be deserted, as if nobody had been on the plane, as if it had just appeared there, for no reason and containing nothing at all.

Underneath the main body of the plane was a knot of felled trees. They looked like pine trees and the scent of them filled the air, almost overpowering the stench of burning rubber. Almost, but not quite. Every time I inhaled, life warred with destruction in my lungs.

I was sitting on the wrong side of a seat when he found me. The botanist, with his heavy bronze compass. The one that would save my life. He took my hand and led me around to the other side of the wreckage. I was so stunned there was a survivor that at first I didn't realize that there were two – he was leading me to another woman, sitting on an upturned seat. She wore a pencil skirt and a white blouse that had somehow managed to stay white in the crash. She was the lawyer, the botanist said.

She smiled when she saw me, serene and undisturbed, and somehow I smiled back.