Flying to Nairobi
Charles Hood
Passenger or traveler, window or aisle, you can’t have both. Do you want to watch or do you want to get up and pee, pressing against the buttocks of the flight attendant as you squeeze past? Get a better magazine, cadge food in the galley, flirt with him, the gay one, or her, whose accent, as she grows weary, grows more southern. Night has spread from window to window like a bruise in fruit. Good hair or good teeth, and after 10 hours you can’t have both. Far below the bats will be out soon, black leaves unbuttoning themselves from the branches and drifting up and out, downwind, over the ponds at the edge of the forest. The feint high then dive straight down onto the water, nipping it with little bites, warning it to stay in place. The night smells like rotting mulch. Small animals come to drink, nervous. It will rain soon. High above a sound is passing, a distant thrumming like engines, but, no, it is—ah, no it is gone now.
