Airplane Reading

Featured story

Afterimage

by KT Thompson

When the airplane crashed in the meadow, I was on a walk to look for birds. My torso a crosshatch of straps: binoculars, camera, sling with water and treats for my dog, the leash.

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Points of departure

POV

by Margaret Goerig

There are moments; do we all know these moments? You're flying. You're at 35,000 feet, or something like it, and there are clouds—so many puffy, white things, floating below, and then there are the…

Compass Points

by Phillip Barron

"Thrust and lift," says the sexual sounding diorama diagramming how planes keep up in the air in the metropolitan museum of science and industry, an industry built on dammed up rivers and cheap electricity…

The Aerial View

by Jessi Probus

Communities can be drawn, created, discovered, inferred. But communities can also be overlooked. There is a community of people who are all in airplanes at the same time. At any one moment there are…

Why I Love to Fly

by Pam Houston

It is 8:00 AM on a Sunday morning in September, and I am down in the East Jesus section of the Denver International Airport where all the smallest United Express flights come and go.…

Pets

by Len Kuntz

Seated next to him, the girl keeps herself busy drawing pictures of dismembered pets—dogs, cats, rodents with collars. He pretends not to notice, looking instead out his window at a bright white heaven under…

From a Seat Over the Wing

by Konrad Eisen

I’m in the window seat typing...when out of the corner of my eye out the window I see what looks to be a rocket. It’s a plane, of course. But it’s incredibly close. For…

The Day the Epic Beast Died

by Denis Robillard

I’m thinking to myself, what am I getting myself into here, folks? When was the last time I really got onto a plane? Surely it’s been over fifteen years now. And here I am…

Albuquerque to Denver, Frontier Airlines

by Sandra Vallie

I could fall the distance between the plane and the ground in a bit more than two minutes. I have no wish to do this, but it’s good to know I can still figure…

Window Seat

by Jim Gustafson

So I am flying from Reno to Minneapolis, in the window seat. On my left the man in the middle speaks to the woman knitting In the aisle seat, her nimble fingers move almost…

Two Flights to San Salvador

by Danielle Susi

May 2010 As our plane ascended, the New York City skyline was a silhouette of pillars, backlit by the rising sun. The sky, a hazy blue-green frosted with clouds. 5:26 a.m. (EST): The first…

Flight Map

by Marit MacArthur

As if the view out the window were not abstract enough, lakes as pocket mirrors, mountains as sugar-dusted alligator spines, tiny towns as constellations, cities as circuitry, we watch the screens on the seat…

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