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Hers She sipped first class bubbles and wondered when her life had stopped being ideas. Around the same time the wheels slurped away from tarmac, or around the same time that she flipped a penny on her life and talked numbers into the quagmires of that man’s life. A little neuron square in her brain had made the executive decision to lie: to talk herself into a shadow. But in this new him-less lifetime, she decided to be as white and opaque as a glass of full-fat milk. She had left her engagement stone on the bathroom floor between pools of airport goo and crinkly brown paper towels before the flight. At first she had faltered, then she remembered that it had been another hers engagement stone before it had been hers. Her mind told her not to feel bad about it all while her fingers looked for champagne. She woke up in a rectangle, the smell of homesickness and Airline cherry soap touching her through the vents of the bathroom. Pupils bright and New York-ed in their dripping streaks of caffeination blinked at her from the mirror. Her hair felt and looked thicker and blacker than car exhaust as she wound it around her fingers. Not wanting to see more, she accordion-ed the door and walked towards a screen that was set to a channel tracing the airplane’s body in its pixelated sidle across the Atlantic Ocean. She placed her left hand, fourth finger on the digital square that had been their digital square of America and let the artificial scalding burn her into a puddle. The veins of a new city sprawled beneath her like broken jellyfish tendrils sleeping on an aquarium tank floor. Her lips folded the air, set to rinsecycle: just don’t think about it. — Morgan Mills, XI (body)
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