THE SURVIVOR
by
Shoshauna Shy
It
was a living nightmare
from
which Olivia could not awake:
tangled
howls in a mash of bed
sheets,
condolences that arrived
on
tea trays in the mornings, the pat
of
hands her forehead
could
not tolerate.
However
long this carried on
she
was helpless to determine –
when
suddenly she packed her bags
and
from the house she bolted,
cashed
the insurance checks then drove
to
the Midway Airport
eleven
successive flights criss-crossing
the
Atlantic .
She caught a non-stop
to
New York
didn’t
fail over the Baltic Sea , then maybe
a
wheel would come loose on the red-eye
to
Nicaragua
Moroccan
tarmac.
She
didn’t care how it happened;
she
just knew the odds increased
the
longer she stayed airborne.
Two
months had already managed to pass
since
the crash that took her Willis, her Macy
and
her Nathan. She couldn’t let days keep
flooding
by or she would never catch them.
Sometimes
it took both pilots
to
get Olivia off the plane.
~
first published in Milk Sugar Literary
Journal
