Great Circle

by Maggie Shipstead

It isn’t how I thought it would be, now that the circle is almost closed, the beginning and end held apart by one last fearsome piece of water. I thought I would believe I’d seen the world, but there is too much of the world and too little of life. I thought I would believe I’d completed something, but now I doubt anything can be completed. I thought I would not be afraid. I thought I would become more than I am, but instead I know I am less than I thought.

Life gives you lemons, you carve off their skins and garnish your martinis.

Everything in the shape of the animal commanded love: her long soft ears, the black hairs mingled with the red on her flanks, the way she slung the tip of her tail cozily over her nose.

In twenty years she’ll be a skin balloon with eyeholes.

told you I have a sister? Kate? I wish I could hold her life in my hands like an egg, make everything good for her. It’s a burden—the wish itself, and the fact it’s impossible.”

“I don’t know what you’re looking at,” Barclay had said somewhere in the plains while Marian stared hungrily out the window. “There’s nothing out there.” The gust of the train washed through golden prairie grass, tossed blackbirds into flight. “I want to see it anyway,” she said.

That was part of the problem: I was always just reacting, always just getting buffeted along, never setting a destination.

Sometimes the glossy black fins of orcas sliced up, rolled down through the water’s surface like the turning cogs of submerged wheels.

Massed uniforms shifted and bobbed on a dance floor like a raft of kelp on a swell, dappled with colored lights.

imagined inviting Redwood downstairs with me, going to bed in the fading light, our armor clanking together.

The landscape was huge and beautiful in the way the concept of death is huge and beautiful—its beauty doesn’t really apply to you.

Funny story—a crew of our girls moving bombers landed because of weather at some hick town and got thrown into the local lockup because women aren’t allowed out in slacks after dark there. The sheriff wouldn’t believe they were pilots. Guess it’s not a funny story. You push on men and eventually you get to the bedrock of it all, which is that they think they’re better than us.

We get angry and nothing happens. Men get angry, and the whole world burns up.