Read by Sarah Feathers
The first time she flies, she holds the black moulded armrest all the way up, seeing ground recede like a backwash tide. The airstrip becoming insignificant and scurrying. Houses and roads and fields obscured lightly as if behind a veil of milk. Power lines change angles with their shadows, obscure geometry. Down there, cattle move slow as growing plants.
What her mother told her: never to move for him. Him or any man, and especially not to the desert god-damn it. There were wolves in the desert and men who killed other men for money and for drugs. She wouldn't last out there. Not on her own.
The first night in the house, they made love on the floor of the living room, on the bare boards, gasping and grasping and sudden. Skin grazed against rough wood. She bit her lip. She came. Around them their lives sat inert in boxes.
The delivery of the helicopter: eight Mexicans arrived with a flatbed truck, the fibreglass body strapped to the back with heavy belts. They lifted it off and down by hand it was so light. He watched them from the door of the house as they unstrapped the rotor blades.
At night in the desert, things howl outside the window, fleet and silvery like wounded boys. After a month she's still not used to the night noise of the desert, and the music of it makes her skin tingle, like going over the brow of a rollercoaster. Beside her, the pilot sleeps soundly, content, hair tangled with the day's dried sweat, pale stubble standing out along his jawline
The house is far too small: there's no space for all their things. Their photographs are stacked like plates in a cupboard. Her china doll remains in its box beneath the bed. Their kitchen is cramped and narrow and when they pass in the hall their bodies brush close enough for heat to transfer.
Nothing easy is ever worth doing: this is what she thinks as she drives seven miles one morning to buy bread and eggs.
How he earns a living: packs of tourists pull off the highway in minibuses and rental cars. Crammed into the tiny bubble of the helicopter he drags them skyward, skims the eight miles of desert between them and the lip of the canyon. Floats over, down, past ancient and decaying railways, thick grikes of rock that have lasted a million years.
Instead of children, they buy a dog. A greywhite mixbreed, yappy and excitable. A desert dog who sleeps in the porch. Some nights she wakes and as she tiptoes to the bathroom she sees him sitting up on the other side of the screen, ears pricked, alert and sharp-toothed as a wolf.
Each week she washes the blue fibreglass eggshell in which he makes his living. It is the only thing in a hundred miles that she is not completely sure she likes. The gleaming runners. The controls worn to a black veneer. Metal rotors as cold as space.
In that first year her belly remains flat as the desert around them. Flat as Kansas. But she is fertile, she knows it. She can feel it glowing out of her like light through a fingernail. She is young. She is in love. They have sex often, and at night she watches him sleep, the inward-outward hushing of his breath.
After High School, she never knew what it was she wanted. So she drifted, waitressing because it was easy, and working at the fair that came to town at the tail end of summer each year. One year a travelling boy told her fortune. He had blonde hair and a scar that ran the length of his forearm. You're going to be famous, he said. She stayed in town and waited for a circus worth running away for.
One day as he's coming in to land, their puppy dog escapes through a hole in the screening. A greyhound blur of speed and loyalty, yapping towards the descending body of the helicopter. She scatters forward, panicked, and manages to catch the collar, drag the animal back as it barks and pants, eyes wide, teeth open in a mad or friendly grimace. It smells strange, hot. It turns in circles, and she twists her fingers into the thick long fur of its back and shushes it until it lies down at her feet.
How they met: he was studying for his pilot's licence at the airfield. Staying in a cheap hotel in town four days a week. He told her that when he learned to fly she would be the first person he would take with him. She'd never been higher than the tops of the trees before. She didn't know if she would be afraid.
Her greatest fear is that one day he will not return. That some malfunction will catch him unprepared and the beloved blue vehicle will spin away into the sky, up and up, unreturning, away from the house and from her and the canyon and the dog, which to him must all look so small.
Her mother asks when he's going to marry her. She says she doesn't know. She read in a magazine that if, one year, you put a pebble in a bowl each time you make love, then next year remove one each time, the bowl will never empty. She tries this. It turns out to be true.
(c) Krishan Coupland, 2013
Krishan Coupland was born in Southampton, and completed a BA at Staffordshire University. He runs and edits Neon Literary Magazine. His writing has appeared in Brittle Star, Aesthetica and Fractured West. In 2011 he won the Manchester Fiction Prize. His website is: www.krishancoupland.co.uk.
Sarah Feathers trained at East 15. Theatre work includes Country Magic (Finborough Theatre), All You Ever Needed (Hampstead Theatre), A Hard Day’s Month (Rose Theatre, Kingston), 26 (BAC), Moll Flanders (Southwark Playhouse) and The Winter’s Tale. Film includes Coulda Woulda Shoulda, Feeling Lucky and More Than Words. Television includes The Real King Herod.
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