Window Seat Molly McGinnis
On my flight back to Washington at 4 am in air marbled by night and snow I leaned against the oval glass and saw tiny bodies of light pushing slowly down the mountain roads, each sphere its own life full of sideways winds. The flight attendant was humming a movie score, pouring the coffee into paper cups. I was thinking that every story I have ever written in my head has been about going home when the student in the aisle seat tapped my shoulder and said I do not want you to worry but do you mind if I pray while thirty thousand feet beneath his question people plowed through a snowstorm hardly stopping to ask for permission. As he whispered in Arabic I imagined the white flurries breezing into the sand gusts outside my old house in the desert and pretended I could understand while cars floated through the chalkboard dark like prayers released from airplanes granted sudden phosphorescence and instructed not to drift upward, but to address the stranger.
fall 2016
69