body { font-family: georgia,times new roman,serif; font-size: 0.9em; color: rgb(64, 64, 64); line-height: 1.5em; }p { font-size: 1em; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 8px 0pt 14px; }h1 { margin: 5px 0pt; font-size: 3.5em; line-height: 1.1em; }h2 { font-size: 1.2em; margin: 2px 0pt; }h3 { margin: 2px 0pt 10px; line-height: 1.1em; }p.text-align-right { text-align: right; }p.text-align-left { text-align: left; }p.text-align-center { text-align: center; }p.font-weight-bold { font-weight: bold; }p.font-style-italics { font-style: italic; } Sitting in my seat, my knuckles
clench my seatbelt as the obese
woman to my left chatters
about her children in Toronto.,
but But I am frowning,
my wrinkled mind
like a collared shirt crammed
in a suitcase the airport
has reported as lost.
“Do you have a girlfriend?
A handsome boy should have
one,” she says as I look up.
I have several, I respond,
one for every city I do business
in. At work they call me Errol
Kintz. In like Kintz—
you know—In Like in like Flynn,
and I start to explain
but the look in her eyes
is as vacant as the cheap motel
I stayed in last night.,
so I stop my sentence short,
just like iI stopped my trip short,
and I recline my seat back
and adjust my pillow just
as iI do at home with my fiancée,
Amy, who calls me a blanket
thief and also a dog because
every night i I somehow manage
to drool on the pillow—her’s,
not mine. My eyelids are twitching
like my legs as I stretch them out.
She was supposed
to be with me on this trip,
but she ran into an old boyfriend
on the way home from work
the other day, and the damage
to her car is extensive.,
but tThe doctors say she should
recover, though she may never
walk the same again. They also say
that she should wake up from
her coma anytime, so I’m
flying back, so I can stay with her
in the hospital and hold her hand
as I whisper in her ear that she
is the only one for me,
and that she’d better wake up
or I’ll hop in the hospital
bed with her and not only will iI
drool all over her and steal
her blankets, but I’ll eat
all the Jell-O the nurses bring.
Then the captain’s voice snaps
me awake, and I see that my head
has been resting on the woman’s
shoulder, and there is a puddle
of drool that she just let roll
down her sleeve rather
than waking me, and my hands
are locked onto hers like
a little boy locks onto a mother’s
leg, but. she She just held them softly
as I trembled like a tiny child
waiting to rush in to the hospital
and wait as she Amy shakes off her coma.
like a child shakes off their bowl of Jell-0 on the floor during a daily dinner tantrum.