flash friday 2-21-14, how much longer? in Flash Friday

“Lute loot. Christ that’s horrible.”

“Sorry, what?”

“23 across --- stolen string instrument.”

“It’s not the man it’s the machine.”

“No, I’m pretty sure it’s lute loot, the ell’s fit, 6 down is awl and ---“

“At work today, it’s where the transcript ended.”

She puts down the paper, crosses the room, puts her arms around my shoulders, buries her face into my neck. The smell of her hair is comforting, familiar, human.

“Hon, don’t pilots all want to say that?”

“I’ve only been with the FCC for three years, and no, I mean maybe, but they don’t and … I’m sorry. No. It wasn’t the pilot anyhow.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Me either. It’s there on the black box, it’s just,” I trailed off I hadn’t said it out loud yet and so I didn’t yet have the words for it.

She held me, waited. There’s a song … and her hair was like corn flowers in May … I don’t know what that means exactly. I’ve seen green corn from the highway before, I don’t know what corn flowers smell like or even what they are exactly, but her hair smelled like corn flowers in May. She was waiting for me, patiently, holding me loosely like a pitcher holds a baseball, loosely but intently.

“It’s just, there were just the two in the cockpit. It wasn’t them.”

“Traffic control?”

“No.”

“Stewarde …”

“Honey,” I stroked her hair, “no, it was … something else.”

She waited again; her lips were soft against the hollow of my neck. Closed. Dry.

“Survivors?”

“No.”

“I’m so --- sad,” the first three months I had the job we had a fight, an argument, I don’t remember what it was about, the words, it was really about me not being able to talk about work if she was going to be sorry. So I didn’t talk about work when she seemed fragile, and she tried hard not to ever say sorry. I wasn’t thinking about that. Sorry would have been ok, maybe not ok, but it wouldn’t have bothered me.

“I think,” I said without inflection, “it was the plane.”