submechanophobia, or the feminine urge to be an airplane on the lakebed
He’s at the window again when I wake up, all red hair and dents in his skin and eyes the color of browned beef. He knows how to open it from the outside but god forbid he ever does anything for himself, so I have to roll over and shove the window open with my sleep-shaky arms, then roll away before his potato sack body comes falling in, off the roof and into my bed, leaving the window open, the rumble and chatter of the lunch crowd following in after him. He’s grinning at me, breath like chewed mint. I can’t help but want to smother him—I put hands on him instead, one right on his chest opposite his heart and the other in the middle of his face, shove him to his back amidst the mess of my comforter and throw pillows and stuffed animals that he won me at claw machines and county fairs. He sucks my index finger into his mouth, teeth just on the wrong side of playful.
“Did you hear they found it?” he asks, spitting out my hand.
“Found what?” I dry my finger on his T-shirt, get up out of bed, leave him lying there with his outside clothes on, shoes and all.
“The fuselage. Pieces of it. Really, really gross too, people still in there and everything. Thought they’d all be eaten up by now, didn’t you?”
I don’t think about it. I tell him that and he giggles, this high-pitched boyish sound that grates on me like the bell of the elementary school just west of my apartment. He tells me I have to think about it, everybody does—the plane that just dropped out of the sky, people and all, vanished into the lake, everyone missing presumed dead. Well they found it now, everyone now known dead, not presumed, and he rolls over to the edge of the bed and asks, “What do you think happened to it?”
“How am I supposed to know?”
“Everyone has ideas. Theories.”
“Not me.”
“Well, do you wanna hear mine?” he asks, but it’s not a question because then he’s prattling off about space aliens and sound waves and g-forces and things that I truthfully could not give less of a shit about, and he’s still prattling when I’ve gotten completely undressed and redressed in front of him. And then I’m in my outside clothes, shoes and all, and he’s still talking so I grab him by his face, hold his jaw closed, kiss his dumb cracked lips, tell him, “Shut up, baby, please.” And he does, well-trained, and follows me back out the window.
The city still smells like jet fuel even though I’m not sure it’s supposed to, even though he can’t smell it and calls me crazy every time I bring it up. To him it smells like rotting meat—he tells me he hopes it’ll change now that they’ve found the plane and the workmen can start cutting its old occupants out of their seatbelts and trying to keep them from falling apart on the trip to the medical examiner’s office. We stop at a newsstand on the sidewalk and I make him buy me a newspaper and then allow him to indulge in a conversation with the stand owner about the jet in the lake.
“It only took this long to find it because there never was a jet in that there lake,” the owner says. “They was using it as a cover’n-up of all the sludge the factories are dumping in there, only planted a plane and people down there when we folks started getting suspicious, I tell ya.”
He tugs on my hand, eyes like gutter puddles. “Did you hear that? They planted the plane in the bottom of the lake as a cover-up.”
“I’m sure they did.” I thank the stand owner for the newspaper, make sure that we paid, pull him away from the cart but he’s built like a brick shithouse and it takes considerable effort; he still hasn’t learned to heel when called.
Walking again and sure enough, the entire town is pressed up against each other, straining the railings of the boardwalk while a bunch of teenage boys in orange jumpsuits wander about the lakeshore and wade into the opaque water in thigh-high rain boots, an assembly line starting neck-deep in the water of boys passing pieces of the plane and its passengers to each other. A woman is crouched at the edge of the boardwalk, manicured finger pointed right at the face of one of the orange jumpsuit boys, two children lingering awkwardly behind her in flippers and snorkels with towels over their shoulders, and the orange jumpsuit boy just shrugs and holds up a pruney purple hand with half its forearm still attached. She’s unfazed; I gag so hard I taste last night’s dinner.
I scrabble at his wrists with my fingernails, enough to leave marks but no blood. “I’d like to go, please.”
“How can we go? Don’t you want to see the plane?”
“No. No, I don’t.”
“But I do,” he insists and plants his cinder block feet on the boardwalk. He looks away from me, lips pursed, as two of the orange jumpsuit boys work together to drag what maybe used to be an elderly man to shore, and once he’s on land, they cover him with a plastic tablecloth from the dollar store and one of them rubs tiredly at his eyes. Apparently they’ve been at it all night, ever since the plane was found at eleven last evening; apparently they aren’t allowed to take breaks; apparently they’re prisoners at the juvie three towns over; apparently this is a high school detention. One of them emerges from under the water, hair dripping gray sludge down his face and into his mouth, holding a massive orange lunch box over his head and shouting triumphantly. The shout rips through the crowd of boys like a tornado; they all go charging into the lake, staining their jumpsuits and crowding around the boy with the box, all desperate to get a touch of it or even just to see it, and I swear that one kisses it, it’s that precious to them.
“I’d like to go please,” I say again but he’s not there, his hand replaced in mine by the little girl in her flippers and goggles. I ask her if she saw where my friend went—you know how we call our partners our friends in front of children because how are they supposed to understand that I hate him so much but still wake up every day wanting to devour him?—and she says no and that she doesn’t really know how she came to be standing next to me either, just that the plane is making her nervous and she doesn’t want to watch it anymore. When her mother promised her they could go swimming, she didn’t know that it’d be here. I take her twenty feet down the boardwalk, still close enough to see and be seen by her mother once she realizes that she forgot her entire child at the lake, and sit her on a bench in front of an ice cream stand. She asks me if I can buy her some, and I tell her of course but still cringe when she asks me for a waffle cone of Cotton Candy Bubblegum. I get it for her anyway, proud of her for having the courage to ask, and sit down next to her.
She asks me how the plane got there. I tell her I don’t know, watch her face shatter with disappointment like that time my brother pitched a baseball through a stained glass window at the local church and got sent away. She’s covered in ice cream by now so I hand her the politics section of the newspaper to clean herself up, but she needs my help so I oblige. She asks me again how the plane got there.
“Fell out of the sky one day,” I tell her, my shoulders already tensing in expectation of her disappointment.
“How does that happen?”
“I don’t know. I’m sure there are lots of reasons. Maybe the plane stopped working. Maybe the pilots got distracted or sick. Maybe one of the passengers was a very, very bad person. We don’t know yet.”
“Why did it take so long for us to find it? I was this big when the plane fell down,” she says and holds her index finger about a peanut length away from her thumb, and I laugh because kids are so fucking stupid but to be honest, I can hardly remember the day the plane fell either.
I tell her that I don’t know. Sometimes it’s hard to find things under the water. I tell her about the time I lost my Barbie doll in the lake near my auntie’s cottage and I cried for the rest of the week. I don’t tell her how I started refusing to go to church after that vacation, how the relationship between God and me became irreparably strained. She seems to know there’s more to the story as she looks at me with her Shamrock Shake eyes, ice cream covering her from the nose down and goosebumps breaking out over her shoulders, daylight giving way to a nighttime chill.
Yelling down the boardwalk: hollering, actually. He’s coming towards me with his shirt rolled up to his elbows and the girl’s mother just behind him, and the girl smiles at me and says thank you for the ice cream. She runs for her mother, trips over one of her flippers, skins her knee. It was my fault, I think. I should’ve been there to catch her. She joins hands with her mother. I want to catch up, hand her my phone number, tell her that I’m available to babysit if she ever needs me, but before I can he’s standing in front of me with his hands on my shoulders and the most devastated pout on his sunburnt face. I bite his chin, ask him what’s wrong.
“They’re not taking the plane out,” he tells me, voice like a deflating balloon. “They said something about how it’s too dangerous, they’re just going to leave it in the lake.”
“Okay.”
“Not okay! I wanted to see it.”
“You saw parts of it. What was your favorite?” I ask him, weaving my hand through his like the little girl with her mother, and the despair on his face melts away like it was never even there as he starts prattling off about how the flight data recorder was recovered and that’ll tell us everything we need to know about the flight’s last moments, and I have half a mind to ask him how the flight had any last moments if it was planted by the government, but then he’s moved on to how they recovered the pilot and he was completely skeletonized. They only knew it was the pilot because he was still wearing his silly hat. We’re heading back to my place, past the newsstand owner, deep in conversation with a man in a news station hat about how he was right there when the plane went down and it was some heroic flying by that brave, brave pilot, pity how it turns out but them’s the breaks, huh?
A crane is coming down the street near us, and I pull him onto the sidewalk between myself and the storefronts because he’s prone to wandering into the road and I don’t think he can make it through this one unscathed. We’re back at my place. I stare up at him as he climbs the lattice to my window—at him, I say, as though I’m not transfixed by his ass—and then follow him up. He’s already asleep when I make it up, and so I sit on the windowsill and listen to him snore, snore, snore, until the sun is setting and I wake him by punching him in the shoulder.
“Kiss me goodnight,” I instruct, and he does.
“I really wish I’d gotten to see the plane today,” he complains as he maneuvers his massive way back out the window. I ruffle his hair as he passes.
“I’ll take you swimming tomorrow,” I tell him, and he grins as he descends and disappears into the darkened town. I stay on the windowsill—the streets are still bustling with noise, things going on. The lake is just a few blocks away, this endless pit of spilled ink in the middle of the neighborhood. Tonight it is illuminated with floodlights, the star of the show, and the same boys in their orange jumpsuits are still hard at work with no flashlights. One of them trips and falls face-first into the water, comes back with a small scrap of the fuselage cutting into his cheek, and his friends all point and laugh like it’s the best comedy show they’ve ever seen.
A whistle is blown. The boys all line up, march out of the lake like a rosary of child soldiers. The crane that passed us on the sidewalk crashes directly into the water, still lit up with floodlights, and my confusion turns to respect as the claw is dropped into the lake right where the plane is said to be—we had the mercy to give her privacy in her final moments, at least, waited for the crowd to disperse before pulling her cold and naked from the depths. The white and red metal of her fuselage gleams under the floodlights, still clinging to her titanium ribs.
The crane hauls her up gently. Green moss and weeds spill from each of her windows. She spits all of her water back into the lake and the crane operator gives her the time she needs. He carries her off into the dark, a funeral procession of techs and politicians and pickup trucks overflowing with jumpsuit boys following behind her.
Eli Kourtis (@elikourtis) studies English and creative writing in Montreal, Quebec. Their work has previously been featured in Millennial Pulp and 3Elements Review and tends to explore feminism, queer identity, and personal experience with mental illness.