Sky Daddy

by Kate Folk

Like dating, death by plane crash was a numbers game. Such an event was vanishingly rare, with odds of one in eleven million. Still, those were far better odds than winning the Powerball, a chance of one in three hundred million. The people I saw buying lottery tickets at 7-Eleven would surely think my dream was insane, but theirs was thirty times less likely, so who was the madwoman, really?

I activated the timer, sat on the ball, and fished in my jeans pocket for my shard of plane. I’d purchased it on eBay for forty dollars and carried it everywhere, as a talisman and a tool of sexual gratification. The piece was white and roughly rectangular, the size of a domino. According to the listing description, it was part of the hull of a decommissioned 737-800. I tucked the shard into my mouth while I perused photos of planes on my phone. First there was the A320, who possessed, in my opinion, the handsomest face of any commercial airliner. I proceeded to the 787 Dreamliner, whose beauty was augmented by his lovely name. Next up, a vintage magazine ad of the retired McDonnell Douglas DC-9, a plane that flaunted a certain “bad boy” appeal, having been involved in 276 aviation occurrences with a combined 3,697 fatalities in his forty-nine years of service, among the worst safety records in the industry.

For once, I was grateful for Dave’s glibness. I couldn’t have handled talking to someone who perceived my suffering and probed it like a tongue in a dry socket.