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“Going” was a short-listed entry in our recently concluded 70th Short Fiction Contest, and is published with the consent of the author.
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Bowen Liu via Pexels
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Going
by D.O. Moore
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First Leg
At some hard-to-pinpoint moment, her days became the gutters that bowling balls drop into. The heavy thud, the inescapable progression to a fixed destination. As she sits at her desk, holding a pen poised over another half-formed list, she realizes her breathing has aligned itself with the rhythmic tick of the overhead fan, which carries on, undisturbed by the chaos of plastic-entombed furniture and scattered half-packed boxes below.
Travel, then. Yes, wonderful idea but she hates making the arrangements. Hates, too, the inconvenience of it all, the luggage to keep track of, the lists of things not to forget, the uncomfortable seats at the airport, the unpredictable smells in the hailed cars, the figuring out what to eat and if reservations are needed. John used to take care of their details.
Somehow she has to get away from the boxes, stacked in every room of the house and labeled “To/From,” so the movers know which ones are hers to unpack and which ones are his for donation. She surveys the physical evidence of twenty-seven years in a turn-of-the-century mansion, never once with all the seats in its dining room simultaneously occupied. Lights never illuminated, hallways never walked down. None of its twelve bedrooms ever a nursery. But six expertly curated rooms to display antiques from different European regions and centuries. A wine cellar. An auxiliary kitchen. A temperature- and humidity-controlled cigar room. None of it likely to be missed.
What keeps forcing itself into her mind’s eye: her trench-coated back as she shouts into the wind atop the Tour d’Eiffel. Paris, then. She sets her pen down and closes her eyes, sees herself strolling through manicured gardens. At the glass pyramid entrance to the Louvre. Reading a book at an outdoor café, a Gauloise propped in an ashtray sending delicate smoke plumes into the afternoon shadows. She books a ticket.
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Second Leg
There can be no anticipating on this trip or its purpose will be defeated. She checks her one bag, and the black carry-on that follows her through the bustling airport feels nearly weightless. She’ll buy whatever else she might need when she gets there. She has brought a scarf, though, to trail and loft behind her as she moves through Paris corridors and alleyways.
She will stroll without a map. She won’t write anything down.
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Third Leg
As they taxi down the tarmac, the flight attendant moves down the aisle, his Airways International airline lapel pin glinting as he reaches to close overhead bins. Buckled in, she tries to resist the urge to reach for the seatback card to read over the in-flight offerings. She’d like to be a je-m’en-fous person.
In-flight movies are tedious, so she raises her window blind, ignoring the potential scowl from her neighbor tapping away on his laptop. She will monitor the clouds while she watches for LaGuardia.
It is not to be. The contained voice of the captain underplays the word “diverted.” They land in Hartford instead of New York, a now-distant city from which her connecting plane will be departing without her in twenty-nine minutes. She’s told to deplane and rebook. It seems unlikely that Hartford, Connecticut, will have anything direct to Paris.
“Honestly,” her neighbor says, closing his laptop with more force than she’d like to witness.
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Fourth Leg
The airline agent got her on a flight to Dulles with a connecting red eye to Paris. Best he could do. A storm is brewing in Texas; cancellations are rippling through the airlines’ systems, he’d said in a well-practiced script as he typed. The seatback card has nothing on offer that the last flight’s card didn’t.
Extending her stay in Paris would allow the movers enough time to complete her compression into the two-bedroom cottage. She doesn’t want to see another box. She will pay the extra to have them unpack without her direction. This is a good plan.
When asked, she tells her seatmate she has neither business nor pleasure planned in Virginia, was put on this flight to get her to Paris. Images of baguettes and buttery croissants taunt her growing hunger. Her seatmate dominates the armrest the entire flight.
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Fifth Leg
The tired heaviness in her arms as she unwraps her airport turkey sandwich reminds her she should rightfully be asleep in her hotel by the Seine. She’ll have to find a place to stay when she lands. The hotel reservation automatically cancelled when she didn’t check in at 5:00 PM. She can’t figure out exactly where she was today at 5:00 PM, but it wasn’t Paris.
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Sixth Leg
Snapping into her third airplane seat since she last slept, she’s grateful for the window seat. Maybe she can lean against it and sleep. As the plane door closes, she glances at her seatmates. Flips through the airline magazine. Looks at the rows ahead and across the aisle.
People are waiting. Rearranging the bags at their feet. Soon they are taking turns getting up to use the bathroom. Some rise to check their belongings in the overhead compartments.
It gets stuffy. The pilot announces they are in line for departure and apologizes for the delay, says he’s turning up the airflow.
At the two-hour mark, they haven’t moved an inch closer to Paris, and the bathroom no longer smells fresh. She wonders if she can sleep soon.
The pilot’s next announcement confuses her seatmates, whose English seems rudimentary at best. She taps into her high school Spanish to translate that this flight crew’s been on duty too long, and the replacement crew isn’t expected for another 90 minutes. They can wait onboard or deplane and rebook. Anyone leaving can’t reboard the plane. Seeing their faces, she worries for a moment that the words she groped for to explain the situation weren’t correct. But then she realizes it’s not the words that are disturbing but the situation itself.
She helps the two women navigate the Airways International app to find a flight back to Mexico City. As they stuff their things back into their carry-ons, the older lady weeps a little. Seems like more tears than a ruined vacation would cause. She wonders if she should ask or maybe try to comfort the woman. As they head up the aisle to the exit, she also wonders if they will be able to retrieve their checked bags. No way to know.
The app shows there’s no better flight for her, so her option is to stay on the plane and wait. She hopes the now-vacated seats will let her stretch out and sleep after take-off.
She then weighs the likelihood of her own checked bag making it onto this plane or where it might otherwise be. No way to know; it’s on its own journey. She touches her pants pocket where she stowed her passport, grateful to be a rule-follower who heeded the airline’s keep-your-valuables-with-you instruction.
On my way to Paris, via Hartford, Dulles, and Chicago, she writes on the back of one of the postcards she picked up in the airport. Without anyone to send it to, she tucks it back into her purse, which she sets on one of her empty seats. She lowers the window blind to make her seat space more like a bedroom. She’s not sure if it’s the exhaustion that’s making the interior of this 747 seem to shrink as the minutes push forward.
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Seventh Leg
A couple she hasn’t seen before makes their way down the aisle, opening and reclosing overhead bins as they advance. Just after they pass her row, she hears the rhythm change. A bin clicks open but isn’t followed by the closing click. She’s wary when the couple reappears, sans baggage, and hovers near her empty seats.
“25 A and B? That us?” The man asks timidly, glancing at his partner.
Her positioned purse has become a statement. She doesn’t reach for it; looks at each of them instead, confused. How can these seats be theirs when they were assigned to the Mexican women who left? The imaginary walls of her makeshift bedroom are crumbling.
After an awkward beat, she relents, moving her purse to her feet. “You just got put on this flight?” she tries her best for a non-incredulous, non-accusatory tone. But it’s very late and at the same time very early in the morning, and her body’s been requesting sleep since yesterday.
“Yes, we were on stand-by,” the wife explains, and somehow that makes perfect sense in this elongated world, where the lines between days have dissolved and space is delimited by upholstered seatbacks and armrests. She thinks about how the armrests used to have ashtrays built into them with silver, levered covers. Like the family she traveled with long ago, she figures airplane ashtrays are relegated to memory and the occasional image online.
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Eighth Leg
They leave the ground at a severe angle. Overhead luggage shifts. The flight attendant hands her coffee and packaged cookies. Some hours elapse, she suspects. She has no firm notion how long they’ve been in the air when the pilot’s “Excuse me, folks,” brings her back from the haze she’d wandered into. She pulls down the scarf she’d wrapped around her eyes.
He sounds apologetic when he relays that they’ve been directed to land in Chicago, the storm in Texas wreaking havoc throughout the system. The collective gasp, studded with angry interjections, almost makes her grateful she’s meeting no one, disappointing no one, with their now-delayed arrival.
She unwraps the jacket that she’d balled up into a pillow and wedged against the window. It occurs to her that Chicago is even farther away from Paris than where she was when she started this journey. She struggles into her jacket, trying not to elbow the woman in the middle seat next to her, who is whispering to her companion. They’re huddling over the phone he holds.
“But just look, we’re not headed in that direction. Look,” he insists. She wonders how he can track what direction they are going. Didn’t he put his phone on airplane mode? Doesn’t using phones cause problems with the navigation or something?
Not wanting to eavesdrop, she quickly looks away when the woman starts to turn toward her. “My husband’s GPS is showing we’re not headed to Chicago,” the woman says, gesturing at his phone. “We’re going in the wrong direction.”
She’s not sure what to say. She has no way to verify or refute this statement and can think of no plausible explanation for it, either. Asking why he’s using his phone seems wrong; plus, she feels complicit in its use, now that she has heard their strange news. She doesn’t want to say anything that smacks of disbelief, though it seems unbelievable they’re headed in the wrong direction. Maybe she’s too tired to understand correctly the words the woman said.
Luckily, the woman doesn’t wait for a reply. Instead, she takes out her own phone and begins typing. Within a couple minutes, she reports to both of them, “My friends in Dallas say there’s no storm. None predicted, either.”
With no response, the woman continues. “I texted them, my colleagues in Dallas. The Airways International headquarters. I work for the airline. They’re saying no storm. Skies are clear.”
None of this makes sense but sends a chill over her neck and down her back. She slides open the blind, hoping there will be something on the other side of the window might confirm they are headed to Chicago after all, that it’s all fine, just a misunderstanding. Instead, blackness looks back at her.
The husband shows her his phone. They are not heading to Chicago.
Her own phone pings a text; the airline is contacting her to let her know that her flight to Paris is canceled. She will have to rebook.
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Ninth Leg
“Folks, this is your pilot. We have to make an emergency stop in Omaha to refuel. We are being told you will not be able to deplane because we will have no way to verify your identity on reboarding. Refueling in Omaha will take 107 minutes.”
This seems wrong. All of it. Omaha is not near Chicago, and when did they use up all their fuel? Couldn’t they issue reboarding wristbands or something to identify passengers and let everyone walk around the airport at least?
Her seatmate’s shoulders are tensed up at her ears, and she’s shaking her head at the phone she leans over. “I can’t get any information from headquarters,” she says. “This is bogus. They have to let us off.”
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Tenth Leg
The Omaha airport is probably not big but is utterly unnavigable. The supercharged light aggressively creates day, while the wall-to-ceiling windows hold back blackness. The terminal’s emptiness makes for unnatural quiet, and numbered gates are endless cul-de-sacs off Concourse D’s two moving sidewalks. None of the shops and restaurants are open. They were allowed off, but no one is saying when they will reboard or from what gate. She leans against the wall at one of Concourse D’s vacant gates. There’s no one to ask. She pulls her jacket around her to quell the trembling that exhaustion has caused. It no longer matters whatever time it might be. Her body weighs ten thousand pounds.
Her phone pings. The airline’s text says she’s been rebooked on flight 2349. That’s not the same number as the flight she was on before. As she hurries back to the gate where they deplaned, hoping she’ll get some information there, she wonders if she can retrieve the carry-on she was told to leave on the plane while they refueled. On the plus side, not having it lets her move faster.
She’s out of breath when she arrives at the gate and the gathering of passengers, some of whom she recognizes from the last flight. She sees her seatmates and asks them if they know what’s going on.
“There’s no refueling vehicle here. We’ve been here the whole time, and no support vehicle of any kind has approached the plane,” the wife says, her husband nodding in confirmation.
She looks out the window and sees the plane pooled in light, alone on the tarmac, its jetway connecting it to the building like a feeding tube.
“I got a text,” she begins. “The flight number is different,” her tone requesting the wife’s insider airline insight. Before the wife can answer, she gets another text, informing her that her flight is canceled and she must rebook.
She can no longer stand. She sits with the couple, who tell her to wait with them. They will reboard together. Her phone pings her with another cancellation.
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Eleventh Leg
She looks around the plane, which is about half-full. She’s back next to the wife, whose name is Anjar. Her husband is Rafi. Even though this is a different plane, she is comforted to be where she was before, by the window just behind the wing.
They are flying to Dallas, scheduled to arrive at 6:30 AM. Her carry-on, trapped on the former plane, is now headed to some new destination.
Her phone is full of texts, some unread, from the airline, with new bookings and cancellations. The most recent one has her on a flight out of Dallas at 6:45 AM. Boarding is to end five minutes before her current flight arrives in Dallas. Tiredness is a nausea that swims through her limbs and swirls in her center.
Paris has proven itself to be a gorgeous idea, not an actual place where someone can go. She imagines her house, hollowed out by now, the movers having hauled everything away. She can’t think clearly enough to calculate but believes she has been in the air for more hours than several days can reasonably hold. She looks at Anjar, who pats her hand. “You will stay will us in Dallas. We live ten minutes from the airport.”
She has no place to go. The airplane seat will go away. Anjar is a stranger and could be a murderer. It must be that Anjar is just being polite to offer her this kindness. She cannot stay at a stranger’s house.
“Don’t cry, it will be okay,” Anjar hands her a tissue.
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Twelfth Leg
The airline has canceled her flight out of Dallas. The line of stranded travelers waiting to reach the Customer Service desk snakes several blocks to the very edge of the terminal. She moved up half a foot 20 minutes ago. She remembers being a small child in a long line for the bathroom somewhere, afraid she wouldn’t make it. She needs a place to go tonight. She punches numbers into an app, searching for a hotel with any vacancy for tonight. Property names fade and disappear as she tries to click on them, changing to no-vacancy status.
Her phone pings with a text from the airline. She’s booked on a flight to New York, leaving tomorrow morning at 5:00 from Gate 57A. If she goes to a hotel, she’ll need to be back at the airport in four hours from now. She looks at the molded plastic airport seats. Could three in a row become a bed?
Her phone pings. Her flight is canceled.
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Fourteenth Leg
The ride-hailing app froze, worked to update itself in a Dante-esque circle, then disappeared. On the sidewalk in front of the airport, a man with a business card with a picture of a car on it offered to drive her anywhere in Dallas for four hundred dollars. She thinks about Anjar and Rafi.
Her hotel room’s shower has no walls to contain the water, but it revives her from the depths of three hours’ sleep. She turns yesterday’s shirt inside out and puts it back on under her jacket.
An airline text cancels the flight she’d pegged her alarm against.
She heads to the airport anyway because that’s where the planes are. There is nothing to carry.
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Sixteenth Leg
She gets on a flight. Her seatmate is rumpled and from Alabama. Was going to a conference in Oregon to give a talk on fire ants’ hoarding behaviors. Never arrived, and the conference is now several-days over, the woman tells her, her voice catching. She’s just trying to get home. She reaches over the armrest and takes the crying woman’s hand.
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Twenty-First Leg
Her jacket is a warm blanket on an airport floor, somewhere on the West Coast she believes.
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Twenty-Seventh Leg
While they wait for their next flight, she’s playing airport bingo with a man who owns a horse farm. They are using cards she made from the pages of a coloring book a boy gave her. The man calls out “Bingo!” His winning square is “Person with a dog.” She congratulates him and gives him the rest of the coloring book as his prize.
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Twenty-Eighth Leg
There is a crowd around the gate agents’ desk. The letters on the sign announcing the gate’s destination and boarding time flip and settle, flip and settle. Suddenly, a cheer goes up. Someone has bought coffee and donuts for everyone at the gate and is passing them out.
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Thirtieth Leg
She’s in a boarding line and finds a crumpled paper in her jacket pocket. Unfolding it, she reads the list of Paris landmarks she’d planned to see, ordered by days she’d assigned them. At the end of the jetway, she drops it and the rest of her pockets’ contents into the trash bin positioned there.
As she steps onto the plane, her insides cycle between terror and weightlessness, paralysis and celebration. She smiles to herself, remembering the poster on the wall in a high-school classroom with its tired adage, “This is the first day of the rest of your life.” For the first time she understands the words as both invitation and warning.
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Thirty-Second Leg
A girl has skinned her knee when getting off the moving sidewalk. Crouching next to the girl, she pulls her scarf from her neck, its graceful silk lofting away from her body. The image of the scarf trailing behind her as she walks on cobblestones rushes through her and is quickly gone, like someone else’s memory. As she comforts the girl and wraps the scarf around her leg as a pretend bandage, she marvels at how something that weighed almost nothing, now that it’s gone from her, has left her feeling nearly weightless herself.
A gate agent with a clipboard approaches her and asks for her name and where she is going. She stops tying the bandage and thinks hard, but it’s too difficult to respond right now. She knows that at some point she will need to figure out what her answer is.
Instead, she texts Anjar to thank her and Rafi for their kindness. She hesitates and then, wanting to reassure them, adds, “Don’t worry. I’m already home, safe and sound.”
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Nth Leg
In the space of waiting, seconds are uncountable. She is quietly content, knowing they, like her, cannot be tethered that way anymore, not when the engine’s pitch will rise and the painted lines on the tarmac will blur. Soon enough, she will feel the acceleration make her heavy once again against her seatback, once the wheels release their hold on the ground. She will be shunted into a trajectory toward an unknown endpoint. They push off from the gate, and she settles in for the duration.
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D.O. Moore is a fiction writer, poet, and translator living in the Washington, D.C. area. Her original poetry and translations of fiction and poetry have appeared in multiple literary journals. Moore holds a doctorate in English from the University of Louisiana, where she studied with Darrell Bourque and Earnest Gaines. Moore’s work is available at domoorewriting.com.
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War. Remembrance. Walls. The High Price of Authoritarianism – by editor/publisher Joe Maita
“The Sound of Becoming,” J.C. Michaels’ winning story in the 70th Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Contest
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