MAXWELL DEYO / EXTRA MEASURES
I began holding things at weird angles, because I never wanted to appear wrong. Straight is never perfect when you are human. You cannot even trust the slope of the ceiling or the floor you are standing on. You hold your PC laptop flat and somebody might think, Look at her, trying to hold her PC laptop flat. It’s not even close. So you tilt it one way or the other. If someone looks at you sideways you may have to speak up, say, I’m holding it this way on purpose. I’m succeeding at what I’ve set out to accomplish. There is every time immediate acknowledgement and respect. You can see it in the corners of the corners of their mouths.
I saw this only once on the face of a fellow pilot. She was a female pilot, like me, and her name was Quintley Manafort. She was a slender woman—so slender I would not have kicked her out of a twin-size bed, even if she had asked to leave. In my scenario, there is something akin to quicksand surrounding us and to leave would be to drown in earth, salt filling her orifices. So in not allowing her to leave I am doing her a serious favor.
We women have to look out for each other in this world of natural and unnatural disaster, Quintley told me after a few Dark ’n’ Stormies in an airport bar. I had also had a few Dark ’n’ Stormies, and the world was beginning to tip. She said, We are never creatures of control. Look at the width of our arms. We are naked to the whims of nature. I reached over and tilted the glass in her hand, slanting the rim beyond plausible levelness, stiff-arming the silent judgment of passers by. I said, We could crash our planes into the ocean with arms as thin as they were when we were girls. That is control enough for me. I saw this sink into the corners of the corners.
Of course, I never did crash my plane into the ocean. Quintley did though. Even the animals drowned.
I read the news on my PC laptop, and I thought of shattering the screen the way a semi-truck shatters a driver’s side window, tilting your minivan sideward until it tips over into the roadside desert—the way it shatters your skull, and the slender body of the woman in the passenger seat—desert sand filling your orifices, sinking into the corners of the corners of your mouths. But I did not shatter my PC laptop. I have learned to be more careful.
I had to learn this. You understand that, as a female pilot, I was under constant scrutiny. Passengers looked at each other sideways when they heard me say, This is your pilot speaking over the intercom. I could see them grip their armrests on the cabin camera. And so I began taking extra measures to ensure they had a comfortable flight. When we lifted off I would say, It’s all good folks, the plane is meant to tip back like this. I am a highly trained expert. And when it came time to land I would say, I know there’s a lot of tilting and dropping going on, but that’s totally normal. I’ve got it all under control. Sometimes, when we went through rougher bouts of turbulence, I would level with them. I would and say, Okay, listen. I know you’re all a bit scared. This is a crazy situation we find ourselves in, careening over the Atlantic Ocean, thirty-thousand feet above the Earth, naked to the whims of nature. But leave the worrying up to me. I am the pilot. I could put us down like Quintley Manafort, and water would fill our orifices, and even the animals would drown. Or I could put us in the water safe, the way I know how. If the plane tilts, it is because I will it. If it lands, if it crashes, the reason is the same.
I awaited their applause as they exited the cabin.
I am no longer an active pilot. I have what some have called a condition, and I am participating in the necessary exercises to remedy this. As a part of the necessary exercises, I conduct myself in daily meditations. You close your eyes and think of nothing but thinking of nothing, and then not even that. Let your subconscious do the heavy lifting. Let it paint abstractions and half-remembered automotive accidents on the insides of your eyelids, shifting canvases like PC screensavers. In this world, semi-trucks oscillate and compress into pinpoints. They pass through your mind as if they could pass through anything. As if they could do anything but collide.
Maxwell Deyo lives in Jacksonville, Florida, where he recently graduated from the University of North Florida with degrees in English and creative writing. He was awarded the university's 2018 Amy Wainwright Award for Fiction Writing. His fiction and poetry can be found in The Airgonaut, Every Pigeon, and A Velvet Giant.