Some Things About Flying by Joan Barfoot

bits and pieces, as on Lila’s television screen, until it ends up in some blood-drenched horror? What if she was right, that just under civility’s thin skin there’s destruction wanting out, waiting for an excuse to unleash itself, inflict revenge?
    Revenge for what? For grievances, deprivations and indignities, or, in this instance, terror—all those things that boil up beneath that fragile and transparent surface.
    Not yet, though. So far there is upheaval, but not real destruction. Close by, someone is moaning, or praying, “Oh God, oh God.” Some people’s lips move silently, some are fingering beads of one kind and another, and who knows what others are doing beneath beards or veils?
    If they go down, it will be, Lila thinks, quite a representative, multicultural crash, demographically speaking.
    There may, for all she knows, be cultural as well as individual differences in how people react to a threat to their lives. An added potential discordance. At any rate, there are dangers inside and out.
    Miraculous, really, how small the world has become, so that people from practically anywhere can, with more luck than they’re having today, be practically anywhere else in just a few hours, and can speak to each other in a matter of seconds. People from practically anywhere can find themselves facing death together in a single compact, narrow space.
    â€œWhat a world,” Lila says.
    â€œWhat?”
    This would be fascinating if one were, say, God: able to peer into these people and this singular event to see what evolves. A kind of scientific experiment controlled in one petri-dish place.
    â€œWhat do you think?” she asks Tom, who is surely experienced in the careful scrutiny of nuance and sorting fact from hope—what else must politicians gauge all the time? Although as a politician he did miscalculate; in the end, he did lose.
    Think, if voters had decided differently that day, Tom wouldn’t be sitting here beside her now. And there’d be no reason for her to be here either, in his absence. Imagine that. One election six years ago, and here they are now.
    Many other factors are also involved, of course; it can’t be entirely the fault of Tom’s former constituents.
    â€œWhat do I think about what?”
    Can that be irritation in his tone? How—tiny of him.
    Heavens, he looks awful. Bloodshot and shaky, as if he hasn’t slept for days. From pain, from knifing cramps, Lila has fainted three times in her life, and imagines that just beforehand she must have looked much the way he does now. Fainting feels exactly like what it is: nourishing blood rushing away from the brain, leaving airiness, absence; and down you go.
    Here there’s no room to fall, except slightly forward or gently sideways.
    â€œTom? What’s the matter?”
    Funny how even in extraordinary situations, common, daily sorts of questions pop out. As if he’d just shown up at her door looking wan after a tough day of classes.
    Most weeknights they’re both free; they recover from their days in Lila’s cool and quiet living room, its pale greys-blues-greens broken by fat flashy cushions, strokes of red and yellow vividness, rather like Sheila’s flamboyant scarf with her military-style uniform.
    It’s a small house, Lila’s, but it’s her own, and dear lord she’d like to be in it right now. It’s a little messy upstairs in her office, scattered with papers and essays and lists of marks, but otherwise it is mainly serene, and safe, within reason.
    Tom, on the other hand, does go on sometimes about his mortgage, and repairs, and alterations. Naturally his place is bigger than hers; it has had to contain more.
    â€œIt’s gauche, I expect,” he has told her, “but I’ve always picked up some small thing from every trip I’ve been on, and I have a whole room of stuff now, with just a couple of chairs. All the walls and