Everything's Eventual

   Looking around wildly at the cabin, she was thinking, It happens at sixteen thousand feet. I have to tell them, I have to warn them.

   But it was fading, all of it, the way those feelings always did. They went like dreams, or cotton candy turning into a sweet mist just above your tongue.

   "Landing? Already?" She felt wide-awake, but her voice sounded thick and muzzy.

   "It's fast, huh?" he said, sounding pleased, as if he'd flown it himself instead of paying for it. "Floyd says we'll be on the ground in—"

   "Who?" she asked. The cabin of the little plane was warm but her fingers were cold. "Who?"

   "Floyd. You know, the pilot." He pointed his thumb toward the cockpit's lefthand seat. They were descending into a scrim of clouds. The plane began to shake. "He says we'll be on the ground in Fort Myers in twenty minutes. You took a hell of a jump, girl. And before that you were moaning."

   Carol opened her mouth to say it was that feeling, the one you could only say what it was in French, something vu or vous, but it was fading and all she said was "I had a nightmare."

   There was a beep as Floyd the pilot switched the seat-belt light on. Carol turned her head. Somewhere below, waiting for them now and forever, was a white car from Hertz, a gangster car, the kind the characters in a Martin Scorsese movie would probably call a Crown Vic. She looked at the cover of the news magazine, at the face of Mother Teresa, and all at once she remembered skipping rope behind Our Lady of Angels, skipping to one of the forbidden rhymes, skipping to the one that went Hey there, Mary, what's the story, save my ass from Purgatory.

   All the hard days are coming, her Gram had said. She had pressed the medal into Carol's palm, wrapped the chain around her fingers. The hard days are coming.

I think this story is about Hell. A version of it where you are condemned to do the same thing over and over again. Existentialism,baby, what a concept; paging Albert Camus. There's an idea thatHell is other people. My idea is that it might be repetition.

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