Swimming by Nicola Keegan Read Free Book Online

as we walk through the crunch of frozen green-smelling hay layered thinly on the ground. It’s so still you can hear the rabbits scatter in fear. Leonard takes his time checking, double-checking. He puts his glasses on and flips switches up and down as I watch the sun tip the horizon with an arc of white light.
    We taxi down the runway, Leonard murmuring stuff to control, control murmuring stuff back. He turns to me as if just remembering my presence, smiles, gives me a thumbs-up: z55 Oscar Papa Romeo, check . The revving of engine echoes in plexus, speed pulling me back into my seat, until we are released from gravity, our internal organs floating slightly as we lift into air. I’m not comfortable sitting copilot because I don’t ever want to die. I don’t like the idea of dying alone with Leonard either. If we’re going to die, we should do it as a family or else it’s not fair. I don’t mention this to Leonard because according to him we are much safer 24,000 feet in the air than driving our station wagon five miles down Thirty-fourth Street to Holy Name’s annual Easter cake-walk. I know it’s true, but it doesn’t feel like it when the Rocket points her nose straight up in the air, breaking the pull of gravity as the earth falls away and I am pressed into my seatbones by forces I cannot see. It makes my stomach churn.
    One of the nicer things about flying alone with Leonard is I get my own set of headphones, which keeps me connected to everything happening between control and the other planes hidden somewhere in the sky. I love to hear them, the pilots passing through Kansas, their swift observations, efficient requests for factual information, the rare jokester cutting through electricity, his voice vibrating off my inner ear, lulling me into a funk so deep and delicious I float in a semiconscious state as I dip my half-open eyes into cloud, into green wavy hill, watching the tin soldiers living out sweet meaningless lives below.
    We cut through a colony of dense gray elephant clouds that Leonard says were designed for maximum gloom. The sky opens to a clear dazzling blue and there she is, the sun, patiently watching with one benevolent eye, and we are the lucky ones and life is a marvel.
    Leonard’s voice breaks through the static. This is good, isn’t it?
    I break back. Yeah .
    He’s quiet, speaking only to point out a strange natural formation in the midst of stalks of corn—broken gold hands reaching up from a blanket of white; the Missouri frozen to a standstill with a locked-in barge, gray and lonely, caught like a fat fly in a web of ice.
    I keep myself busy calculating the space between land and sky. I plant my eyes on the ground and concentrate hard on the fall. Sometimes I have us catapult into the air before impact, landing on our backs, blackened, bruised, with smoking frizzy hair and oil-slicked faces; stunned but alive. We smile at each other in amazement, teeth a deep cartoon white. But mostly my mind is drawn to the crushing, our zest pierced by harder lifeless things, lives escaping our bodies in a mad hiss of steam, our noisy insides as blank as screens after someone has pulled the plug. Our simultaneous death moves me to delicious tears that I hide in the arm of my sweater as Leonard sweeps us forward through the sky, as confident of the machine that holds us in her metal belly as he is of anything in the world.
    He clears his throat. I need you to do something for me .
    This is new. I clear my throat. Okay .
    When he doesn’t say anything, I turn to look at him. We’re flying steady over generous spoonfuls of white mousse. He feels me looking, doesn’t turn, white clouds crossing his dark glasses like ghosts. He speaks quietly: I need you to make things as easy as you can for Bron and your mother .
    I adopt his tone, whisper: Okay .
    He’s done, switches off the headphones; someone flying in from Kansas City is requesting permission to land.
    Landing is tricky. Rushing sensations,