Image by Dawn Surratt

Through the front glass, I see only sky. Since we separated from the runway and left Janelle standing beside the small terminal, smiling and holding the video camera and that silly balloon, I’ve kept my eyes straight ahead at the sky.

“These seats are comfortable!” I shout over the engine’s roar. My voice cracks. I sound more sickly than I really am. I should be happy, I know, because I’ve made it to another birthday and because a private flying lesson is a great gift from my wife.

But I’m not happy. I’m scared to death.

Carl the pilot taps the side of his headphones. “You don’t have to shout,” he says.

“Sorry!” I shout. “I’m just nervous!”

As the plane climbs, a pocket of air collapses below us and we jerk downward. My stomach contracts. I feel like I’m going to vomit, but it’s a false alarm. I learned during chemo how to tell a false alarm from the real thing. Still, I’m nauseous. Sweat beads form where my hair has begun to grow back.

“Alright,” says Carl. “Now we’re going to bank.”

“No! No banking!” My skin hurts.

“Don’t freak out on me, chief. We have to bank at some point. Can’t fly straight forever. Remember, it’s your birthday, so just enjoy. Okay?”

“Okay!”

“No. Need. To. Yell,” Carl says, his voice rising. There’s a sharp crack of static after every syllable. “Relax-ckk,” he says.

I breathe deeply. Cold air, tinged with the smell of fuel, invades my lungs.

I imagine being in the car, on our way home. Janelle will drive. She will point up at the sky and pat my knee, which will still be shaking. Then we will hit a pothole, and I will bite my tongue.

I hear a ckk in my headphones – a ghost of a sound.

The more I study the sky, the more immense it becomes. I could fall forever there. My fright would shift – from the fear of crashing to the fear of being trapped in perpetual terror.

The plane bounces again – another air pocket.

I think of ways to get back at Janelle for planning this, but not much frightens her – not heights nor speed nor water. And she’ll eat anything…crickets, snake, brains, heart.

I think of telling her the cancer has returned. Or maybe I’ll dress up as a zombie. She hates zombies.

When the plane’s engine slows, I look at the instrument panel and spot a gauge showing two horizontal lines twisting away from one another.

We’re banking right.

“Enjoy the view!” Carl yells.

But I’ve shut my eyes. I slip toward the door and feel weightless for a moment.

Then something sputters and dies.

The engine.

“Shit-ckk,” Carl says. I open my eyes wide. Carl is fiddling with knobs and turning the ignition key. His hands are white.

“What?”

“Come on,” he mutters.

We begin to fall.

I’d be panicking if the view wasn’t so astounding. Now, instead of blank sky, I see earth through the windshield. The sun has broken through the clouds, and a shaft of light expands until it bathes the valley in warmth. The fields below are a series of plush carpets in green and gold.

The airport is in the distance. I wonder if Janelle can hear that the engine has died. I wonder, too, if Carl will radio the tower. “Mayday, mayday,” I expect him to say, not that there’s anything they could do. Our fate, I know, is up to us – only us. Still, it seems the normal thing to do.

“Should we call someone?” I ask, noticing the stillness of the ride now that we’ve lost power. Air flows around the plane, enveloping us in an unwavering hum.

“Yes.” Carl’s eyes are moist. He nods, but makes no move toward the radio.

I zero in on it. It looks just like a car radio. I click one button and then another until I hear static, followed by a beep. “Good,” Carl tells me.

“Hello? Is anyone there?” I ask, looking upward through the windshield. “Can anyone hear me?”

A tinny voice answers. “This is control. Carl, you’re losing altitude. What’s your status?”

Silence.

“Carl!” the voice snaps. “What the hell’s going on?”

“Um, we’ve lost power,” I say. “But we’re dropping fast.”

“The engine died!” Carl adds.

“Can’t we just glide?” I ask, imagining a peaceful landing softened by thick alfalfa.

“Of course,” says the voice. “But you’re a lot better off with an engine. You need speed, Carl. Come on, this is standard stuff, for Christ sakes.”

“I tried.” Carl turns the key again but there is no response.

“Drop your nose!”

“I said I tried!”

“More! Do it now, before you run out of room.”

When Carl doesn’t move, I reach for the wheel.

“Now!” the voice commands. My fingertips touch the hard plastic. I look up. The terminal and its short runway are impossibly close. How did they get that close?

For a moment, I’m back in the hospital. Every morning, my room was full of flowers, the only scent that didn’t nauseate me.

“Tell Janelle,” I say. “Tell her I’m okay.”

Leaning forward, I press on the wheel, hard and fast. The plane’s nose sinks. Air rushes by, faster and faster. The windows rattle. Then there is another noise.

Sput-sput-sput.

The engine rumbles to life. The propeller’s blades spin. Carl cheers so loudly that I have to shrug off my headphones. I feel the wheel being pulled back. I release my grip. Carl is re-animated, poking at gauges and rocking in his seat. His smile is wide and he moves his lips, but all I hear is the engine.

Carl banks the plane hard. Again, I slide toward the door. This time, I keep my eyes open. We’re in a low pivot over the runway.

Rising toward the opening in the clouds is a shiny, silver orb: my birthday balloon.

I look down to see Janelle. The camera is at her feet, in pieces, and her hands are raised, high above her head, stretching toward me.

Glenn Erick Miller’s writing has appeared in The Citron Review, Red Earth Review, and Agave Magazine among others. He is a recent first-place winner in the Adirondack Writing Center’s annual awards and is currently writing a novel for young adults.

“The Places We Hide,” Image by Dawn Surratt

Liam walked down the hill from the rented cottage and along by the churchyard wall. He felt a pinprick bite on his ear and looked up. A column of gnats hung over him in the evening air like an unclear thought.

Opposite the village green, several youngsters were skateboarding down the sloping concrete apron in front of the pub, aiming themselves at one another and only changing course at the very last moment. The lone girl taking part dipped and swerved with particular grace, redistributing her weight with fluid movements of her arms, hips and feet, her pony-tailed ringlets flying. She reminded Liam of a girl surfer he and Justine had watched in Cornwall the September before. How envious he had been of the way the girl laughed to herself as she splashed out of the ocean and walked back up the beach, her eyebrows and lips white with sea-salt. After dropping her board on the sand, she shook her arms and legs in a shivering dance, shouting out that the water was “Tit-freezing cold.” It hadn’t been easy to look away from the elastic curves of her wet suit, the long zip an invitation – drawing it down like peeling a fruit.

“So all the tales about men in middle-age are true,” Justine teased him later, having followed his eyes. “I want to make it absolutely clear that I won’t wear rubber for you no matter how nicely you ask.”

The village telephone-box was of the old-fashioned sort, the exterior pitted and scabbed with layer upon layer of red paint. Its battered appearance and survival into another time seemed almost stubborn. Perhaps there was a kind of liberty in being overlooked, in being allowed your own history, your own lost world? Opening the door, he remembered the Japanese soldier who, when rescued from a lonely Pacific island twenty years after VJ-Day, refused to believe that the war was over and his country had been defeated.

Even on a summer evening the box’s interior was redolent of urine and wet wool, of shelter on dark, rainy days. There was a dead matchstick, a Kit-Kat wrapper and a wizened brown apple-core on the shelf beside the receiver. On the floor there was a sooty mark where somebody (the parish pyromaniac?) had unaccountably tried to build a fire.

“Oh it’s you,” Justine answered. The disdain in her voice sounded vengeful, a weapon readied in advance.

“Don’t get too enthusiastic, now,” he said.

“I won’t.”

“Expecting a more attractive offer, is that it?”

“And you’d care, I suppose.”

Liam stepped back into the life he used to live. He asked how her preparation for the new teaching term was progressing; if there had been a call or letter from Davy; how she was coping with the bills; if the garden was getting overrun; whether her car was going okay. As he spoke, he listened to what he was saying as a stranger might listen. It was eerie, the feeling of being on the outside, at a distance, eerier yet to discover he was able to talk across that distance. Here was here and there was there.

Justine’s replies were listless, resentful. “Feel easier now, do you?” she said when his questions began to falter. “Feel everything at home is all right so you can go on exactly as you are, go on treating me the way you’re treating me? I don’t have to stand for this, you know. I might be a fool for you, but I’m not a fool. If you think I don’t have what it takes to carry on on my own then you’re wrong. If I have to manage I will, so don’t kid yourself on that score. You never know, keep on as you are and you could well find there’s nothing for you to come back to.”

Liam allowed her to run on, to get it all out. “None of what’s gone on has been about you,” he said when she had finished. “You know that.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Don’t pretend to misunderstand. I feel bad enough as it is.”

“Do you?”

“You’ve been very patient.”

Her laughter was bitter. “What choice have I had.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you?”

“How can you ask that?”

His certainty seemed to take her by surprise. There was a pause.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“You sound different,” she said.

“Do I?”

“Yes. More in control.”

It was Liam’s turn to laugh now.

“Does that mean you’re not?” she said.

“Perhaps.”

Justine sighed to herself. “You haven’t got three wishes. You’re who you are now. Nothing stays the same. You’ll have to come to terms with it eventually,” she said.

“I know.”

“You agree?”

“Of course I do. I’m not stupid.”

There was another pause.

“Are you still there?” Liam asked.

“Yes.”

“You’ve gone very quiet.”

Tom Saunders, an award winning writer has a novel Inappropriate Happiness and two collections of short stories, Brother, What Strange Place is This? and Roof Whirl Away, , as well as his poetry collection To the Boy, available in print and on Kindle at Amazon UK and USA. They can also be directly purchased from the Reuben Books website. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, appeared in many anthologies, and is an ardent photographer in the UK where he lives.

“Flying in the Face of Reason” by Dawn Surratt

She led me down a dark dirt path off the pavement. I’d met her fifteen minutes into the Fantasy Party, we talked for maybe ten minutes, and she said let’s blow this popsicle stand, and I, always ready to follow a redhead, agreed. Our only light was the flash from her iPhone and we ended up at an old barn. “This is what I wanted to show you,” she said, sliding the barn door open and heading towards a far corner. This is the path to a nest of spiders. She began to undress and said, “Nothing turns me on more than making love in the straw knowing there are spiders only inches away.”

I will only follow a redhead so far. I said adios and found my way back to the party where I re-introduced myself to the bartender and chugged a double bourbon with one cube to settle me down. I saw the redhead again and watched her lead someone else out towards the path.

“If I had a drink like you just did, I’d feel like my soul’s on fire,” said a more safe and hopefully sane brunette. “Don’t much like spiders?” she asked.

“Not much,” I said feeling the bourbon mellow and massage my insides.

She said, “Let’s grab another drink and go down by the swings—I’ve never gotten over my love of playground swings. I love Bill’s parties, don’t you?” I told her I’d never been to one before and she said, wrong answer, and then I remembered the invite rules: make everything up including your name, occupation and phone number. This is my First Annual Fantasy Party, the invitation read.

It was a pleasant evening and truth be told it was fun swinging and sipping my drink. “Want me to push you?” I asked and she said, “Maybe after we get to know each other better and by the way, what’s your name?”

“Arnold,” I said.

“That’s the name of my accountant, gynecologist and former divorce lawyer and also the name the Indian man uses when he calls to sell me solar panels. My name’s Henrietta and after the spider episode what gave you the courage to follow me outside?”

“Cleavage,” I said and she said, “You realize you said that aloud, don’t you?”

“The bourbon is the key that unlocks the filter between my brain and mouth,” I said and she found that charming. Then she said, “Okay you can push me now,” and I stopped my swing and pulled back the ropes on hers and pushed her forward.

She kept saying higher, higher, which my brain heard as harder harder so I pulled back and let it rip and pushed her harder and higher and when she was above the top of the swing she let go of the ropes and spread her arms and flew off to parts unknown. I walked back to the party thinking perhaps I wasn’t cut out for Fantasy Parties and went to the bar where the bartender was ready with my double bourbon and one cube, looked around and saw the spider lady and the swing lady entwined on the couch and walked out, glass in hand, looking for a cab.

Paul Beckman was one of the winners in the Queen’s Ferry 2016 Best of the Small Fictions. His stories are widely published in print and online in the following magazines amongst others: Connecticut Review, Raleigh Review, Litro, Playboy, Pank, Blue Fifth Review, Flash Frontier, Matter Press, Metazen, Pure Slush, Jellyfish Review, Thrice Fiction and Literary Orphans. His latest collection, “Peek”, weighed in at 65 stories and 120 pages. His published story website is www.paulbeckmanstories.com and blog is www.pincusb.com

Read an interview with Paul here.

“Sustained by Faith” by Dawn Surratt

They’re eating an early dinner at Little Mo’s Spaghetti House, and he turns away to ask the waiter for more Parmesan. When he looks back, she’s gone.

He remains at the table, picking at his green salad, but she doesn’t return or answer when he tries her number. So he pays the bill and leaves.

Back home, he calls her name, checks every room, turning on all the lights.

In their bedroom, her wardrobe door is open. He peeks inside. There’s the blue dress she wore at their daughter’s graduation, last summer. He presses the dress to his face and inhales.

By the dressing table, he catches his reflection in the mirror. He no longer looks younger than his age, he thinks, rubbing the back of his neck.

Downstairs, he faces the brick open fireplace, feels the solid oak flooring under his stockinged feet, and considers these and all the other home improvements he’s made lately.

He remembers when they first saw the house and met the previous owners. An old couple. The woman had stood at the kitchen window talking to them, but keeping an eye on her husband, outside tending the vegetable garden. After a time, she wiped her hands on her apron and leaned forward, searching. Then she yanked a rope that hung by the door, and a bell rang. It sounded like an old school playground bell. Moments later the man appeared from behind some tomato plants, waving to her, and she went up on her tiptoes as she waved back.

Those people must be dead now, he realizes.

Grey, filmy light fills the living room. He thinks he hears footsteps on the front porch and springs up from the sofa. There are things to say. And time is running out. He steps into the hallway, listens for the key in the lock, then everything goes quiet again.

Digby Beaumont is an English writer. His flash fiction has appeared widely, most recently in Bartleby Snopes, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Camroc Press Review, Change Seven Magazine, Flash Frontier, Jellyfish Review, 100-Word Story, Cosmonauts Avenue and Olentangy Review. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology. He made a living as a nonfiction author for many years, with numerous publications.