hurtling one hundred and eighty miles an hour to his death, charlie knipper at last felt free. 

fuck it, he thought, leaning back in his chair. he was the last passenger still seatbelted into row twenty. rows one through nineteen were nowhere to be found. he recalled his fury when the gate agent handed him his middle seat. she had refused to move him, and he had fought with her. 

the flight is full, sir, she insisted, scooping a blue acrylic nail into her molar. he had cussed her out and chucked his jacket around the waiting area like a petulant child. strangers stared but never looked him straight in the eye. one of life’s many disappointments.

but in the end, a turbofan engine swallowed the lucky bastard who got the aisle. and the quiet young woman by the window, not wearing her seatbelt, at some point fell upward into the sky and disappeared. charlie recalled the scene he made at the gate and cringed. typical charlie: he took nothing well.

and yet at eighteen thousand feet, charlie was surprisingly chill. maybe it was the dazed confusion from onset hypoxia. or perhaps it was the frostbite seeping into his fingers and toes. but everyone gets a way out, charlie amused himself, and this could’ve been worse. he imagined himself bed-ridden and alone, cancer feasting on his innards, or broad-sided by a bus, face down on the roach-infested city sidewalk. perhaps shot in the back by someone he loved or pulled kicking and screaming into the swamps by some ravenous gator. faced with a world of endless hostility, what was a little free fall? some folks paid good money for the thrill. and this was better than that high-flying, daredevil bullshit. this time, the danger wasn’t an illusion. it didn’t mimic panic or dress itself up in crisis. it was as terrifying as it appeared. still, from a distance charlie imagined it not so bad. from fifty miles away, he was little more than spinning samsonite, a speck of moondust, one more grain of sand over the big arizona desert.

charlie knipper closed his eyes and rested his thoughts on his mother’s face, ten years gone, the way she’d been at sixty, round-faced and smiling, comforted and blessed. he took a second for tara. where had she ended up? and was she ever happy after that? he wanted to say he was sorry for how they left things, the mess he’d made, the lies they’d told each other. he hoped there were no hard feelings.

from this high up, the sands of the sonoran were the color of a ripe tangerine and there was still plenty of time to see, time to panic, time to piss on yourself and shriek. but no one would hear his tantrum this time. the universe stared but did not look him in the eye. at a thousand feet, he would count his breath and be mindful of the windchill and the speed and the earth.

charlie had wanted to be cremated. but he reckoned this would do just fine. good scraps for the owls and coyote. nothing left behind. all the precious energy he’d guarded his whole life, set free in one last explosion of guts and hair. he wished he could be there to see it: the release.

charlie surprised himself. he took nothing quite so well.