Monday, May 31st, 2032, Newark Airport, New Jersey, USA.
1. Airbus 330

Marvine nudges Bo on the back with her ragged fingertips. A soft tap to keep the little girl moving down the aisle. The cabin is humming, overhead lights flickering like dying stars. The numbers on the boarding passes, 52 L and K, worry her. What do they mean? Will they be crammed into the last row again, the one with aromas from the bathroom? Hand sanitizer at best, and, at worst? She tries not to think about it.

The old man ahead of them, hunched and shuffling, stows his bag with rheumatic slowness, and there it is: her worst fear realized. At the end of the plane, the configuration shifts—rows that were three, are now two, a crumbling afterthought of the aircraft’s design. Bo, counting aloud, as if every number is a victory, points to the very last row.

“Fifty-two!” she declares with the gleam of discovery in her eyes, her voice carrying across the empty cabin.

Marvine forces a smile. It’s brittle, stretched too thin. Goddamn last-minute seats.

She ushers Bo toward the window and slings the backpack onto her own seat, rifling through it with the practiced motions of a mother of six years. She unpacks. iPad and headphones. Markers and coloring books. Snacks. All the tricks of the trade to stave off a meltdown. And then, at the bottom, Blankie—yellow, threadbare, crocheted with a hope for the future she can’t quite remember. She tucks the bag under Bo, drops into the aisle seat with a heavy thud, breathes deep. That metallic scent of recycled air. Marvine reaches out to Bo, but she shakes her head, signaling she is fine to buckle herself in. Marvine watches for a moment, her fingers lingering in the air before retreating. Bo activates her device, and a world of fantasy unfurls on the screen, the soft glow of animated colors flickering, their silence a counterpoint to the noise of the filling plane—the shuffling of feet, the thump of luggage in the overhead bins.

Marvine scans the space they’ll inhabit for the next seven hours. The seats, dusty grey leather, stare back at her. The Am-Eir logo, a kingfisher enclosed in a circle, is stitched into the seatback pockets and a small, white rectangle reads: “LITERATURE ONLY.” Marvine smiles at the absurdity of it. Beneath the term’s pretention is the reality: a sick bag, a flight safety brochure, and an in-flight magazine that will surely contain bland articles and perfumed advertisements for luxuries beyond her means.

Above her, the ceiling is a smooth landscape of curved plastic, punctuated with buttons and symbols. Air nozzles, lights, lozenge-shaped panels—all of it repeated at each row. An old pop song begins to filter through the intercom, the distorted crackling of a tune that feels both familiar and distant, like the echoes of a parallel world. Bang, bang, into the room...

Under the music, a constant high-pitched tone is ringing. Some sort of alarm. The sound pulls her mind back to the house she left this morning, the choking humidity of the interior, the cloying décor she chose long ago, the soft click of the front door closing behind her, the headlights of the taxi approaching through the green morning light, two hours east towards the rising sun. Even then, the sky had been tinged with a color that she knew wasn’t natural, wasn’t right. Now, through the oval airplane window, it still has that same nauseating viridescence. Pollution, perhaps, from Newark’s jet-fuel heavy air.

Outside, fluorescent figures unload baggage from a nearby propellor plane, sending it piece by piece down a conveyor belt, where other glowing figures load it into carts. The usual pre-flight safety announcement has begun, flat and impersonal: “Larger electronics like laptops should be stowed in the overhead bins…” Marvine’s gaze shifts across the cabin. Passengers file in—couples whose faces have become indistinguishable over years of shared baggage; a woman in a red velour track suit; a long-haired teenager with a faded Ukrainian flag across his chest; a balding man with the face that reminds her of a long-ago disgraced soccer star. Diagonally opposite, an older woman, tanned, her hands blotched with age spots, is tapping ineffectually at her seat’s entertainment screen. After she has given up, she idly winds a tiny gold wheel on her wristwatch. Marvine can see that it reads nine o’clock.

Time to push back. Push back, she wills the pilot.

Bo’s finger points. “Mrs. Grady, old lady,” she whispers.

Marvine shoots her a look, too tired to shush her. “Mr. McCann, old man,” she whispers back, and they giggle, a shared joke, a rhyming game that they can play all day.

As the last of the stragglers find their seats, a tall man in an airline uniform marches all the way to their row. His sharp eyes blink a polite hello. Marvine watches him settle in the seat across from them. A pilot, off-duty, she thinks. They are putting him in the back with the riffraff. Must be a full flight.

Now, a real human voice on the speaker: “Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to flight Am-Eire 423 to Shannon. Boarding doors are now closed. You may continue to use electronic devices in airplane mode. Please ensure that your arm rests are down…” Marvine looks up the aisle at a leathery faced flight attendant donning a life jacket and pulling the toggle to no effect.

Across the aisle, the pilot unfolds a crinkled New York Times with slow resignation. A single image spreads across the top—almost the entire page devoted to a massive, fiery orange sun, flaring violently against an ink black sky. The headline reads, in bold, apocalyptic letters: Solar Flares Threaten Earth: High Risk for Blackouts, says NASA.

Marvine’s eyes linger on the paper for a moment. For several years, she—along with everyone else on the planet—has heard the news, seen the warnings flashing across screens: predictions of communications failures, electrical systems falling apart. Ever since the new solar cycle started in 2030, solar storms have made the news as regularly as hurricanes. Marvine remembers the panic: the shelves emptied of bottled water, toilet paper, baby formula; people huddling around the latest forecast. She might have contributed in a small way to the baby-formula shortage, herself, but what choice did she have? But nothing has ever happened. Either the storms haven’t been as severe as had been feared or the satellites and power grids have been upgraded to cope with the effects of the solar winds. The news has moved on: the war in Greenland, a female president, a recession…

Marvine’s stomach turns. She wonders if she can feel the storm. Or if the uneasy churning in her stomach has little to do with the sun. She reaches into her pocket, feeling for her phone. The screen blinks with stark red letters: SOS. No internet connection. Her thumb hovers over the screen, pressing it again. But the letters don’t change. There is a soft ping, a hiss of static, and the first officer’s voice crackles over the intercom. The plane is delayed—federal law requires full operable communications before takeoff. “We will keep you updated on a departure time, but as of now, we are looking at a delay of at least twenty to thirty minutes until we can push back. But, of course, with a strong tail wind as we head into the Gulf Stream, we will endeavor to get you into Shannon as close as possible to your scheduled arrival time. For now, just sit back, relax, and we will update you as soon as we can.”

There is a collective sigh from the cabin: unheard, she imagines, in the flight deck. But felt, nevertheless. But there is something else—something that lingers in the space, as if the air has become too still.

The toilets flush as passengers take advantage of the grounded plane. The alcoholic smell of hand-sanitizer drifts in the air. And so it begins, she thinks, seven hours of either this smell or the other. Bo’s pre-downloaded animation is continuing without interruption, colorful figures darting silently across the screen. She holds the device in her right hand and the front section of her hair back like a curtain with her left. She is still wearing her pajamas, sequin-covered gold boots on her feet casting glimmering light on the fuselage’s Formica interior.

Outside, the flight and cabin crew are descending down the aviation stair of the propellor plane: no access-tube for a small aircraft like that. As they board a minivan, the baggage handlers load the final bags into the rear of a two-car train. A cleaning crew, also in fluorescent vests, arrives.

Marvine pulls the magazine from the seat pocket. She lingers on the cover. Taranis, it reads in bold font. A drone's eye captures a stretch of ragged land, a lighthouse guarding the restless sea. The headline reads: The Culinary Comeback of the New Jersey Riviera. The words stick in her brain. Riviera? It’s too polished, a fiction better suited to Southern Europe: Monte Carlo, Nice, St. Tropez. She knows the Jersey Shore, the cheap frivolity, the greasy food, the lack of basic human civility, the exhaustion of long hours in bad jobs and her promise of a social security number that would never come. Her fingers idly strum the pages at the corner of the magazine as she reads. A Tex-Mex joint in Atlantic City, a seafood restaurant in Wildwood, a Michelin-starred chef in a high-rise hotel. And then, something that catches her attention: The Millers' Inn. A photograph of a man, thick and solid, standing next to a woman whose broad face glows with contentment. She is holding a basket of greens like an offering. Behind them stands a quaint stone building with a waterwheel that Marvine can almost see turning in lazy circles. New Jersey State wine, locally grown vegetables, house-cured meats, reads the subheading. The chef’s pride is his Josper grill, it says, an enclosed charcoal oven that chars meat at scorching temperatures. Grilled Delaware Bay oysters. Seared beef cheeks. Cooked with love. As her eyes trace the outline of the chef’s hand around his wife’s waist, there’s a familiar tightening in her chest, something pulling her back in time.

A photograph of her and Adam, she heavily pregnant, glowing, his arm around her. Taken by the new neighbor on the day they moved into their house. They’d bought the old house on Mountain Drive, a road that zig-zagged up the steep bluff over Beverley, Pennsylvania, an old mining town at the southernmost tip of the Appalachian Mountains. The part of town where old professors lived in big houses, porches overlooking the sunset. Adam was out to work at the mine early, but he was back home early too. By the time Marvine had finished her lectures and picked up the baby, he had brought in the mail, made drinks, and was waiting for her on the deck in the horizontal light. “You take care of the inside of the house, decorate it however you want, it’s all you,” he’d said. She’d leaned into her domestic role, picking out country fabrics and wallpaper. Mid-century furniture to match the house. She barely noticed the second part of what he said: “I’ll take care of everything outside the home: the mail, the trash, the finances.”

One winter day, the college issued a snow alert. Class cancelled. By noon the halls had emptied, the doors locked against the coming storm. A light flurry had begun by the time she reached the daycare, the first stray flakes settling in her hair. She drove home beneath a sky gone pale and heavy. Snow was thickening as she pulled into the drive, the world around her dissolving into whiteness. She sat for a moment, watching it fall in the rearview mirror, watching Bo watching her back with big, expectant eyes. Then she stepped out into the hush, unfastened Bo’s buckles, and lifted her into her arms. Before going inside, she walked to the mailbox, opened it, bent over to peer inside: a neat stack of white envelopes.

Behind her, she heard the shriek of tires. His truck slid to a stop on the slick ground. Inches between them and the bumper.

“I get the mail!” he shouted through the open passenger window.

“Jesus, Adam! You almost hit us.”

“Well…don’t go to the mailbox, and I won’t almost hit you.”

“What?” she shook her head.

“You do inside things, I do outside things.” He was out of the car now, his hand skimming the front of the truck. He removed the stack. Slammed the mailbox. He walked back to the truck without looking at her.

“OCD much?” muttered Marvine.

“What did you say?” He turned, skirted the truck again. His gait was hunched now, bent into something else. Something unrecognizable. She’d never seen him like this. Before she could move, he took her by the ponytail. Her head snapped back. Clouds hung low above them now, swollen, taut, as if the sky itself was about to smother them.

“This is a stunt,” he said, looming over her, his voice high-pitched. “Trying to control me, corner me like a dog.” Marvine’s breath caught in her throat. She couldn’t speak. She held the child close to her, hand over her head. Just don’t hurt the baby. Adam didn’t wait for her answer. He placed his lips near her ear.

“I am the man of the house,” he whispered, his carious breath hot on her skin. His free hand grasped her raised throat, his fingers digging into her glands. “Promise you will not interfere with outside things again,” he whispered. His fingers tightened around her throat; his palm pushing her larynx into her windpipe.

“Promise.”

Suddenly, Marvine is overcome by an intense popping in her ears, the sensation of a tiny hole opening, air rushing through it, in which direction she can’t tell. High pitched whistling and crackling. The air is thick, suffocating. The ceiling seems to heave. Oxygen masks drop from their cubbies, curly cables, transparent tubes, clear bags, triangular yellow mouthpieces, dangling in unison like a smack of jellyfish. There are some distant whimpers. A shriek. But sounds are diminished, as if the volume has been turned down on the world.

Marvine looks at Bo. She is frozen, looking back at her with wide eyes. Marvine reaches for Bo’s mask first, pulling it over her daughter’s face, knowing she’s supposed to help herself first, but unable. Her chest is burning. Her mouth is open, gasping, inhaling. But she can’t breathe. Her heart is thumping in her chest, her stomach convulsing, her diaphragm trying to force her mouth to take a breath. Take a breath. With the last of her remaining air, she yanks her own mask down. Pulls the elastic over her skull and pulls the device to her face. She draws in a sharp breath. Cold, artificial air seeps through the yellow cone, settling into her lungs with a bitter chill. The mask presses into her skin, a parasite on her face. She smells burning. Frantically, she scans the plane to find the smoke. But sees none.

The old woman across the aisle, Mrs. Grady, looks back at her with panicked eyes, condensation filling her mask with each tense breath. How can this be happening? We are on the ground—on the ground. How can the masks deploy? Her mind trips over the thought, loops back, strains against the confusion. She knows about decompression. Knows a plane has time to descend to a breathable altitude. She saw some show about it. A Greek carrier. Helios. Something like that. It had decompressed gradually, and the passengers had died in…how long? Fifteen minutes? Twenty? Was that enough time for a plane to descend? But descending is impossible, a voice in her mind screams. We are still on the ground. The thought hangs in her brain. Still on the ground. She can hear nothing but the hypnotic thumping of her heart.

Try to clear your head.

But her thoughts are slow. Everything around her hazy.

The pilot across the aisle is up on the seat, kneeling, a half-mad glint in his eye, rummaging through his bag with a kind of frantic urgency, his movements jerky, hurried. He is jamming something into the ceiling—something small, thin, like a nail file. He is tearing into the overhead mechanism. As if his life depends on it. Then, all at once, the jellyfish-like objects fall on him. Four of them. They bloom from above, descending in a slow, grotesque tumble, creatures from another world, their translucent forms shimmering. The man catches them awkwardly. He unbuckles his seatbelt with a swift motion. Stands up. Steps into the aisle. He takes a stride forward. He pauses, his back stiff, the oxygen tentacles swaying at his hip. He turns, looks at Marvine for a moment. The plastic oxygen bag hangs limply from yellow cone that covers his nose and mouth, connected by tendrils to the oxygen device in his arm and its dangling siblings. The pilot’s steely eyes meet hers, and he stretches his hand toward her. The gesture is strange. Out of place, like a man reaching out from the edge of the world. He is offering her something. The file. She doesn’t know why. Doesn’t understand what he means by it. He mumbles something, muffled and distant through the mask. Something like “baff-oon.”

Buffoon, she wonders, as in, a fool? An insult? What the hell?

She takes the file from his outstretched hand. Without waiting for any answer, he moves again, slipping up the aisle with a fluid, desperate haste. Where is he going? Out? Is he running away from something? Or toward something? Marvine watches him go. His figure is swallowed up in the darkness of the next cabin. For a moment, she wonders if she should follow. But she knows she can’t. She knows they are fixed to these lifelines.

There is a snap of sound. Then another. Another. Like hailstones. A fat, thick, plopping on the fuselage. Outside, heavy black blobs splatter on the ground, radiating bloody spatter from their small bodies, spilled ink across the concrete. “Birds,” Bo whispers, her voice muffled beneath the mask. The thin air fills with the sound, the relentless thudding of small bodies against metal. The birds fall, plunging from the sky in a deathly rain. Their small forms strike the fuselage with a fierce, chaotic rhythm. Outside, the ground is littered with their broken bodies, black and twitching. The Cessna’s smooth exterior is streaked with red. The cleaning crew is sprawled like beached starfish on the stairway. Motionless. No air outside either. The hail eases. For a moment there is silence again.

But there is another sound now. A high-pitched whistling, sharp, piercing, coming from somewhere beyond the plane. Then, through the oval porthole, the silhouette of an aircraft appears, dropping with a terrible speed, nose down. It grows in the window until it fills the frame. Time seems to slow for a second, as the plane dips beyond the air traffic control tower. And then, the ground beneath them groans. A shock wave ripples through the earth. There is no sound. No explosion. No flames. Just the vibration of something large and inevitable hurtling into the ground. A plume of dust, beige and white, billows up from beyond the prop plane.

And then, the tip of the tower—just visible—twists. Tilts. The tower collapses into the haze. A second mushroom cloud blooms—dark, against the churning jade sky, the dust and debris spreading outward in a slow, unnatural cloud.

And there is another sound, emerging from underneath the others. A second, deeper rumble, drawn out. The whole world trembles as if it’s alive. There is no mistaking it now. Something is coming. The thundering deepens, the force of it trembling through the seats, through the bones of the passengers. The cephalopod cables, hanging limp and twisted, quiver in the air. The shrieks of the passengers are muffled, distant. Some are frozen, faces pale, heads pushed back in seats, eyes squeezed shut. Others stare out the portside windows, their eyes wide, as if seeing something beyond comprehension. The noise fills the air now, a violent crescendo, an unholy shriek of tearing aluminum. Then comes the brutal sound. A crash.

The plane shudders, rips open. The deafening screech of metal on metal, overhead bins cracking, luggage flying out like popping corn. Bodies tumble from a gaping wound at the front of the plane—where the front of the plane had been. Windows shatter. There is a slow breaking sound and the floor heaves upward. Marvine's body is flung up and sideways as the plane bucks. Her temple crashes against the frame of the seat. There is a jolt in her stomach, a brief falling sensation—for a moment she is touching nothing—and then, a deep impact on her tailbone shudders up her spine. The world around her blurs, stars dance in the dark corners of her vision, and the warm taste of copper fills her mouth. When she opens her eyes, she is reclining, as if in a dentist’s chair. No, the whole fuselage is reclining. The front of the plane is gone, consumed by the unknown roar that had torn the plane apart. Beyond that ragged tear, only the sky is visible, a deep grassy color. Marvine’s breath comes in ragged gasps. But the seatbelt has held her body in place, pressing her midriff into the crumpled seat. She reaches out instinctively, her fingers grasping for Bo.

Bo is there, just visible in the fog, curled into her seat, holding Blankie against her cheek, her eyes glassy, her voice small.

“Mama.” The word cracks through the chaos, thin and fragile, the air almost too thin to carry them. Marvine grasps Bo’s hand. Her vision is blurring in and out of focus. But she can hear Bo’s quiet distant voice again.

“You’re bleeding.”

Marvine raises her hand to her temple. Her fingers come away, slick and warm. She holds them up, staring at the blood. It is a dark mavrodaphne red, saturated and stark against her pale skin. Nauseating. The sight, red blood against green sky—no longer through windows but through the raw wound in the plane—makes her stomach turn again. She tries to grasp what is happening. The flight attendants, the masked figures who had been standing in the aisles moments ago, are gone. The pilot who took his oceanic bundle of masks toward the cockpit, gone. Everything beyond row thirty: gone. Her heart pounds in her chest as her gaze shifts, and she sees where they are now. The plane has been rotated and upended, torn and spun.

Through the window, she can see its amputated shadow stretching a long dark silhouette on the concrete. The rear section of the plane is all that remains intact, the jagged line of destruction articulated in the truncated fuselage. And in the distance: Manhattan, shimmering in the verdant sunlight, something out of a dream—something unreal. The city, so close, yet so far, rising like the Emerald City, a fictitious wonderland of dreams both broken and fulfilled.