747

The alarm clock radio buzzed like a transmission coming through to a post-apocalyptic bunker. The king bed shook as if the house were coming down. Wrought with nausea, I glanced at my husband, his brown hair tousled, his face half obscured by the linen comforter. His chest rose with a shaky snore, and fell with a soft exhale. He had been asleep for hours with no interest in waking, having taken no notice in the buzzing. Then again, Michael noticed very little. He didn’t notice when the number 7 followed me for months, he didn’t notice the mysterious rearranging of our furniture, and he certainly didn’t notice the sure voice blasting through our alarm clock radio, asking after me by name. 

I turned my head slowly, the clock flashing 4:35 in red, the once innocuous glow now sickly. 

“How did you find me?” I whispered, choking on my words. 

Static cut in. “This is Delta 8121K, entering left downwind runway 10.”

I grimaced. Those numbers. I knew them like a twin. The model, the runway, the pilot’s crackling voice. “You can’t be here.” I tried to reason. 

“Am I clear to land?” The pilot replied. 

“This isn’t real.” I tucked my knees to my chest, trying to focus only on the feeling of my heart hammering, quick and alive like a jackrabbit. 

“Am I clear to land?” He asked again.

I swallowed, unable to remove myself from the rocking, the buzzing, the overwhelming screeching of engines. 

“You’re clear.” I murmured. I braced. Wheels hit the tarmac. The bed gave one final jolt. The crackling stopped. I gave in, fell onto my back, and let sleep take me. 

Michael worked construction. He took long contracts, left early in the morning, and came home in a quiet mood. I’d never minded. The emotional intimacy in my friend’s marriages felt confining and sticky, so I figured that a distant husband was a nice compromise. Besides, I was distant too. Now that the plane was back. 

My nights slipped into frantic insomnia. The threat of the plane constantly loomed, a presence most potent on my side of the bed. I couldn’t handle it. I started walking again. 

Situated on a lake that the developers couldn’t pave over, the suburb was incidentally home to charming woods: wild raspberries and nettles curling up new fences and signs instructing pet owners to keep dogs on leash. I held a flashlight in one hand and my keys in the other, sharp and situated between my knuckles. My paranoia was unfounded. There was nobody out there. I breathed the cool spring air. The ground was sure beneath my feet, the artificial forest sweet like wild fruit. I used to play there when I was young. Before my father had vanished, before my home was uneasy and nauseating, before I had retreated far into the city. I retraced my steps, slow, stopping to commiserate at the grave of every snow fort. 

Then there was the treehouse, my personal childhood holy site. It was built years prior to my birth, and as a result it was already a mess of rotting steps and rusty nails by the time I could climb. I wasn’t sure who built it, wasn’t sure if it was permitted by the city. Nonetheless, the community had let a thicket of spindly trees and sharp brambles take the area due to the perceived danger of the thing, which made the treehouse very hard to find for those not in the know. I’d drag every good friend into those woods, and we’d keep the secret of that site as if we were under oath. I had stumbled to the site for the last time at ten, when the plane had at last disappeared from my nightmares. The night I’d received the call about my father, home alone in the pillowy calm of the evening. Things had always had a way of finding me, following me. Never before had I coped with a disappearance.

At nearly thirty, I pried through the sharp bushes and snagged my sweatshirt tight on a thin branch. I felt as if I was walking through a solid wall of bush, but it gave out with enough brute force. It sent me onto my hands and knees in a patch of dry dirt, coughing before a thick stump. There was no tree, no fort, only the skeleton of a tree which I did not know. The air was saturated with the smell of rot, and the ground was soft. My breath picked up without reason. Beside the stump was a good variety of forsaken children’s toys, grime-covered plastic trapped beneath ivy. There was a chubby toddler’s doll of a girl, then a man, and a plane. I sat down, suddenly unable to take a breath deep enough or a step steady enough. When I was calm, I tore the toys from the ground and grasped them in my fists like a child uninterested in sharing. I took them home and melted them in the fire pit. The girl stared up at me with black dotted eyes while she burned. I put the fire out. 

Once inside, I stripped off my drenched sweats, shoved them into a corner of the tiled bathroom floor, and looked at my thinning face in the cloudy bathroom mirror. My hair was damp, my eyelids veiny and purpled in the flickering light, but I reckoned that I didn’t look unwell. Not deluded, from what I could observe. As if I could focus hard and find the hallmarks of insanity in my crow-footed eyes, or my still-braced front teeth. I turned the shower on. 

“This is Delta 8121K, we’re experiencing a bit of turbulence, adding ten minutes to our ETA.” 

I was in my classroom, picking at an unappetizing salad. The children were playing outside. Delta 8121K had been gone for two days- I thought myself lucky. Childishly, perhaps, I figured my little ritual in the backyard had worked. Now here he was, albeit off-schedule, voice warbling through the old cd player I’d pulled out for a French quiz. 

“Delta 8121K, stay on the line please.” I coughed, white knuckles grasping at my shaking desk. A kitschy #1 teacher slid from the edge and cracked clean down the middle, spilling red pens and spare erasers everywhere. 

“What do you need, Ana?” 

I shivered at the use of my name. “Why me? Why now, after all these years?” 

“Pardon?” There was a heavy surge of static, but I could hear the man’s baritone voice below it all, laughing. It wasn’t a sinister laugh. Nothing cartoonish about it- it was the type of laugh I’d give my students when they mistakenly called me mom, or my husband when he washed my jeans on the wrong setting. The sort of laugh that indicated I was being strange rather than insightful. 

“I mean, I don’t work here. I didn’t work here when I was ten years old and I certainly don’t work here now. Besides, you… I mean… what are you, anyways? I used to think that I was picking up your signal by mistake, but that can’t be true, can it? Not after twenty years. Not after…” I trailed off. I sighed, slumped my head onto the table. My salad was tipped on its side, even less appetizing. 

“Ana, what the hell are you on about?” He laughed again, before the radio went silent. In the absence of the static, the world felt hollow. Longer than it was wide, like the school play set in the gymnasium. There were layers of curtains, whimsical plywood trees and flowers. They’d done everything that the school’s budget allowed, certainly, to make it appear as if it had some significant depth. Yet I knew that if I were to walk forwards at a steady pace I’d disappear into the darkened concrete backstage within seconds. Then, I supposed, that if I turned around and looked at everything from the back, all the carefully painted set pieces, I’d see only shapes and lights. Beyond that, rows of the most mediocre seats money could buy. An auditorium, false and liminal, full of people but devoid of life. 

“Ana?” 

I knew that tone. I swallowed, dropped my groceries at the front, my footsteps heavy with guilt. I’d done something wrong. I had no idea what. Perhaps it was the clothes on the floor. Perhaps it was the slipping out at night. Either way, my name felt like poison to me. 

“Michael?” I parroted. 

“Ana, we need to talk.” My husband sat, legs crossed, at the kitchen table. His reading glasses pinched the width of his nose. His laptop was open. I couldn’t make out what was on the screen. 

“What about?” I said, sweetly. I was trying to return to a normalcy which I’d never maintained in my life. 

“You haven’t talked to me in two weeks.” 

The words fell heavy in the middle of the room. 

“That can’t be true.” 

“It is. I’ve been keeping track. See?” He turned the computer to face me. I squinted. He’d been keeping a spreadsheet. A goddamn spreadsheet. As if I had a quota to fill. Wash dishes. Do laundry. Speak to husband.

“I’ve had a lot on my mind.” I said, quick. 

Michael paused: “I’m a good listener. You know, since we moved back here, you’ve been...” 

“I need to take a walk.” I told him, without thinking. I turned on my heel, heading for the door. 

“Ana?” Michael called, concerned this time, rising to follow me. 

I pushed through the door. There was a puddle of condensation beneath the groceries. I ignored it, and marched back into the woods on autopilot. After a few seconds, I couldn’t hear Michael’s footsteps. He’d probably gone to tend to the groceries. I exhaled, the breath taking form in the air. It was foggier than earlier. I could barely see ten meters ahead of myself. 

My phone rang. I let it go to voicemail, once, then twice. The third time, the voice of the pilot patched through, and I staggered, leaned against a thick oak tree. 

“Ana?” It asked, wrought with noise. 

I swallowed, murmuring: “I can’t help you.” 

The world stopped shaking. I staggered forwards, hesitant. The quiet ached, like a vacuum. There were no crickets, no birds, no soft rustling of the bushes. Then, from the fog, a form emerged. Painfully slow, the metal nose of a plane glided towards me. Then the wings, only a suggestion of a machine in the thick mist. I could just barely see the windows, the unmoving jet engines. It came to a stop just above me. I was looking straight up at the heaviness of the thing. 

I didn’t say anything. There was no radio. I sweat and choked back vomit until my body gave into my whims and took off running. 

“Ana? Can I come in?” Michael had been yelling for some time, but I was finally well enough to hear it. 

“Just wait outside, please.” I rested my head on the brim of the toilet seat, soaking in the cool of the 70s porcelain. 

“What’s happening? Are you pregnant?” 

I didn’t think I was pregnant. “No.” 

Michael shifted behind the door. 

There was a weighty silence. A silence which held all the potential in the world. The potential to resolve my sickness. To deepen it. To ruin my relationship. To mend it. 

“The plane is back.” I finally said. “The plane is back and I’m afraid that this time it’s coming for you.” 

I heard him slump against the door. “You should call the psychiatrist. What’s her name? Doctor Jamie? Jessie?” 

“Jessica.” I sighed. The tile squirmed beneath me. I wanted to run again. 

“It’s not that I don’t believe you…” he reassured. 

I put my back against the bath and stared into the void of our white walls. I remembered moving in, the house before its maintenance was a chore to me. The visceral joy of returning to my childhood home- of feeling ready to return to my childhood home. The simple defiance of painting that very bathroom wall. 

“The plane is going to crash tonight. It’s going to crash and something bad is going to happen. I can’t stop it.” I said, like a chant. 

“You can get help.” My husband told me, cracking open the door. He met my bloodshot eyes. I must’ve finally looked deluded enough. 

“It’s not like that.” I replied. 

He nodded. “I have to work early. You know. Promise you’re alright?” 

“I’m fine.” I lied. 

He left the room, went to bed. I had a shower and waited for the inevitable. 

“Ana?” 

I shot awake. I’d fallen asleep in the bathroom, too afraid of my husband’s judgment to crawl into bed. I was on my back in the bath. 

“Ana?” 

The voice was coming from the shower head, like falling rain. There was a light coming from it, illuminating the small bathroom as if there were an Angel hovering in front of me. The bathtub rocked. A storm crackled around me, like the bathroom had been lifted up into the sky. I swallowed. 

“It hasn’t changed. You haven’t changed. The storm hasn’t changed.” I replied. I could hear a distant noise crescendo on the other line and immediately knew what it was. Screaming. Tens of passengers, maybe hundreds. I couldn’t make out individual voices- they operated like one singular entity. Writhing. Just like I remembered. 

“Ana, we’ve got some serious turbulence. I’m not sure if you’re hearing this.” The voice was warped, but I knew the pilot. I couldn’t forget him. 

“I can’t help you!” I cried, standing, reaching towards the shower head as if it were a portal to him. 

“Ana!” 

I flinched before I heard it- an explosion on the other end. A woman shrieked, followed by the muffled sound of running, shuffling. 

“Listen: you’re going to die tonight. You’ve died before and you’ll die again. There’s nothing I can do. It was never my responsibility.” I muttered, face so close to the shower head that I was blinded, blinking away harsh yellow light. 

There was no reply. The man’s breathing was heavy. 

I sat back down, felt my ribs tighten, my body crumbled from the perceived impact. There came a horrible sound from the shower, a crunching, as if the plane and everything within were outstandingly fragile. As if it meant nothing to break. I didn’t hear people’s voices anymore. They trailed off, somewhere imperceptible in the distance. There was nothing. No breathing. Only the low crackling of fire and the creaking of a defunct machine. I exhaled, pale and shaking on the floor of the shower. I cleaned myself off and stood to go to bed.