Phoenix

A crack of lightning woke me from my fitful slumber.

My face quickly jerked away from the window that I was almost drooling on. Rain started pelting the roof of the plane as thunder boomed, sending a chill through my sore bones. I squinted against the dim light of the cabin.

I sat up and gazed over the seats in front of me. A blonde flight attendant was standing at the midway point, speaking to a woman about her screaming baby who was no doubt just as paranoid about flying as I was. It was clear that everyone else was restless too, with their huffs and puffs and neck stretching.

My attention turned to the plump business man sitting next to me.

"Have they said when we'll be landing?" I asked quietly, voice cracking with another jolt of turbulence.

"Yeah," he stopped typing on his Macbook and glanced up. "The Captain said we'll be landing in about twenty minutes, but it's not gonna be fun."

He mumbled something about Midwest monsoon season.

True to what the New Yorker (I came to assume through his thick accent) next to me had said, the landing was almost disastrous.

Bump.

Skid.

Thump.

Somewhere below, metal screeched like it had scraped the ground.

"I apologize for that, folks. . . You all signed the wavers, right?" The Captain joked over the crackly intercom. The flight attendant winked at me when I rolled my eyes.

The plane began to slow, until we entered the terminal and stopped for the first time in three hours. Unbuckling and grabbing my bag from below my seat before I was supposed to, I pushed past the fat business guy and started up the isle. Everyone else soon followed suit. I got stuck three-quarters of the way to the exit. I moaned, pulling out my phone.

Three new messages came through the small bit of service available. All were from mom.

Where r you? - 6:39 PM

I saw the weather. You might get stranded in AZ. - 7:21

Call ur dad and text me back when u land - 8:55

These only added to my already bad mood, so I just shoved the device back into my jeans and sighed as the older couple in front of me worked to get their small suitcases from the upper storage. I glanced around, surveying the people on the plane. There was the lady with the wailing baby - she had circles under her eyes and the kid had tears pouring from his - and a guy whom I assumed to be her husband, a couple of girls who looked to be in their twenties (both brunettes, both uninterested in my checking-you-out stares), a tall ginger guy who was by himself, and a older biker-looking man with a gnarly black and grey beard. Everyone seemed to be put off by the ungodly noise made by that child and the lateness of our arrival.

By the time we got off, it was also apparent that we were stuck for the night. Everyone who was going to Seattle, which included me, was sent downstairs to a vacant terminal in which we could rest for a bit. I considered calling mom or dad, but instead I just sent them both a mutual text.

Stuck until further notice. Don't call me - sleeping.



"Hey, kid," someone was patting my shoulder. "Wake up."

I tried to ignore it.

"Sweet heart, wake up."

"Mooooom," I groaned.

The chuckle wasn't hers though.

"Come on, kid. They're moving us." I scrunched my nose, opening my eyes just enough to see the face above me. It was a middle-aged woman with brown curly hair and a round face. Her voice was soft and lips thickly set (maybe it was just smudged lipstick). "There's a plane getting ready to take off for Vegas, and then we'll get transferred to one bound for Seattle. Come on."

She stood up and pulled a little sleepy child behind her. I rubbed my face before picking up my backpack, which I had been using as a pillow, and following the group. I peered out the tall windows as we all trudged along the empty terminals. My phone read 5:45 in the morning. Several text messages had compiled, but I didn't concern myself with them. Something else had caught my sleepy eyes.

It was a messy, strawberry-blonde bun set in the back of a thin framed girl who was probably two heads shorter than me. She had a worn-out backpack strapped to her, and in one arm she held a terribly worn-out flannel blanket. She turned to look at me as if she knew I had been looking at her. Her cheekbones were prominent; a few freckles scattered themselves across her nose. A red mark from her shirt sleeve across her forehead made me snort, but it wasn't intended to be rude. It was just a result of my exhaustion, I think.

She frowned at me. I didn't see her again until we boarded the tram back to the main building of the Phoenix airport. I sat behind her, the icy steel seat biting into my sleeveless arms. I wondered if Strawberry Shortcake was cold.

"I wasn't laughing at you," I stated, my head resting against the bar to her seat. I watched goosebumps raise along her bare shoulders. "You just had a thing on your forehead. . ."

"You shouldn't be so quick to speak." Her voice didn't seem to fit her body. It was thicker, almost - almost as if she knew things that darkened it. I didn't pay any attention to her remark. I shrugged and yawned.

"What's in Seattle?"

"A better question is, what's not in Seattle, hot-shot. And the answer is Georgia."

"What's wrong with Geogia?" I retorted as the tram began to move. I watched the sky turn purple.

"People I hate and mosquitoes, even though there's hardly a difference," she stated simply. Her southern accent was showing. "I'll never go back to Georgia."

"I see. . . So you're just running? Nowhere to go?"

"Look, I'm just trying to fade west. But what's it matter to you?" She snapped, looking at me from the corner of her bloodshot eye.

"It doesn't," I replied just as abruptly. I leaned back in my seat and sighed. Daylight was approaching quickly, but I didn't see its real magnificence until we got to our destination.

The Seattle bound passengers all went upstairs to another waiting area, this one overlooking a food court. The seating was arranged so that we were also looking out over the entire runway area, and to the far right, over a barbed wire fence, the parking lot. Before I sat down, I had stopped to see what she was looking at. Well, what everyone was looking at.

We stood there for what seemed like an hour, staring at the sunrise that I can only be jealous of now. The beams were peeping from behind the desolate clouds and silhouetting the surrounding mountains - the former were strokes of crimson and tangerine and dirty yellow, with the latter still only dark purple and deep blue smudges. The lights of the city were fading against the sun's rising. Phoenix was already stirring, like an angry anthill in the early morning. The rain was sprinkling down, creating a dim rainbow across the sky.

"God," I mumbled. The stranger next to me turned away without a word. I watched her, a girl no more than seventeen or eighteen, walk down the stairs towards the security area. She disappeared, only to reappear in the parking lot fifteen minutes later. She walked down the sidewalk confidently, as if she had a plan, and then she was gone forever.

I'll never see that girl again, and as I sit here in boring old Seattle, three months later, I wonder what happened to her. I wonder if her family misses her; maybe she's homeless, though that'd be a shame. Perhaps she was found and sent back to Georgia, or maybe she found a good job and is making good money. I wonder if she's as happy as she thought she'd be.

More over, I can't help but dream of what would have happened to me if I had decided to stay stuck in Phoenix.