l a p s e

the small things

On my left sat my mother. On her left sat the botanist. He was restless and constantly opened and closed the little tray on the back of the next row of seats. My mother did not seem comfortable either and constantly fidgeted, running her fingers over the armrests, through her hair, across the zipper of her purse.

I don't know if she was nervous because of the botanist being nervous. Maybe she felt a twinge in her gut, like I did. Maybe it was eating her up because she knew something would happen, and she couldn't do anything about it.

I will never know, because I didn't ask.

On the opposite side of the aisle sat the lawyer. I remember admiring her shiny black pumps and the fat gold band on her ring finger, her perfectly applied makeup and straight posture. I saw the thick file on her desk, filled with papers that said appeal and case and other official-sounding things that I didn't understand.

She didn't say she was a lawyer, but I guessed right anyways.

When the refreshment tray came to our row – the one by the exits – she took a glass of orange juice. It sloshed a little, but didn't spill. She set it down onto the tray and after a couple minutes the surface went still.

My mother ordered a coffee for us to share, even though I'd just had one at the airport. It was watery and over-sugared but we drank it anyway, and it had gone cold by the time we got half way through. I set the glass on my tray for the cart to take it when it came back around. The lawyer's cup was still full. Even though the plane was going up and down the surface was still placid. Not a single ripple ran over its surface. I watched the lawyer; she was reading a document urgently and punching things into a calculator while she did so.

I wondered why she was on this plane. Maybe she was late, too, for a case that would change her life. She was nervous because she knew she would lose, or was it because it was her first? I made up stories in my head, possibilities, alternate realities.

My story for the botanist went like this: he wasn't late to anywhere, neither was he early, and he'd got on this particular plane because it looked just like the one his father flew. Same seats, same everything. He was just flying to some place, getting on random flights at each airport, hoping he'd end up somewhere new so he could study it.

The two seats to the left of the lawyer were empty. She'd put her bag on one, and when we hit a particularly bad spot of turbulence it toppled over onto the floor. The lawyer bent down, under her tray, to reach it. I don't remember if she came back up. She could have suffocated there, bent double, stuck under her tray.

The cup was still full, I think, when the plane crashed.