hand down the front of Kate’s Wranglers when she was fourteen. When Kate told her mom what he’d tried to do, her mother said it was her own fault for dressing like a slut.
Kate will also never see her twelve-year-old half brother again, and that does make her sad. Liam is sweet, peaceful, and autistic. Kate got him a drone for Christmas, and his favorite thing in the world is to send it aloft to take aerial photographs. She understands the appeal. It has always been her favorite part of getting airborne, too, that moment when the houses shrink to the size of models on a train set. Trucks the size of ladybugs gleam and flash as they slide, frictionless, along the highways. Altitude reduces lakes to the size of flashing silver hand mirrors. From a mile up, a whole town is small enough to fit in the cup of your palm. Her half brother Liam says he wants to be little, like the people in the pictures he takes with his drone. He says if he were as small as they are, Kate could put him in her pocket and take him with her.
They soar over the northernmost edge of North Dakota, gliding in the way she once sliced through the bathwater-warm water off Fai Fai Beach, through the glassy bright green of the Pacific. How good that felt, to sail as if weightless above the oceanworld beneath. To be free of gravity is, she thinks, to feel what it must be like to be pure spirit, to escape the flesh itself.
Minneapolis calls out to them. “Delta 236, you are off course. You are about to vacate our airspace. What’s your heading?”
“Minneapolis,” Waters says, “our heading is zero-six-zero, permission to redirect to Yankee Foxtrot Bravo, Iqaluit Airport.”
“Delta 236, why can’t you land at Fargo?”
Waters bends over the controls for a long time. A drop of sweat plinks on the dash. His gaze shifts briefly, and Kate sees him looking at the photograph of his wife. “Minneapolis, Fargo is a first-strike location. We’ll have a better chance north. There are two hundred and forty-seven souls onboard.”
The radio crackles. Minneapolis considers.
There is a snap of intense brightness, almost blinding, as if a flashbulb the size of the sun has gone off somewhere in the sky, behind the plane. Kate turns her head away from the windows and shuts her eyes. There is a deep muffled whump, felt more than heard, a kind of existential shudder in the frame of the aircraft. When Kate looks up again, there are blotchy green afterimages drifting in front of her eyeballs.
Kate leans forward and cranes her neck. Something is glowing under the cloud cover, possibly as much as a hundred miles away behind them. The cloud itself is beginning to deform and expand, bulging upward.
As she settles back into her seat, there is another deep, jarring, muffled crunch, another burst of light. The inside of the cockpit momentarily becomes a negative image of itself. This time she feels a flash of heat against the right side of her face, as if someone has switched a sunlamp on and off.
Minneapolis says, “Copy, Delta 236. Contact Winnipeg Center one-two-seven-point-three.” The air traffic controller speaks with an almost casual indifference.
Vorstenbosch sits up. “I’m seeing flashes.”
“Us, too,” Kate says.
“Oh, my God,” Waters says. His voice cracks. “I should’ve tried to call my wife. Why didn’t I try to call my wife? She’s five months pregnant, and she’s all alone.”
“You can’t,” Kate says. “You couldn’t.”
“Why didn’t I call and tell her?” Waters says, as if he hasn’t heard.
“She knows,” Kate tells him. “She already knows.” Whether they are talking about love or the apocalypse, Kate couldn’t say.
Another flash. Another deep, resonant, meaningful thump.
“Call now Winnipeg FIR,” says Minneapolis. “Call now Nav Canada. Delta 236, you are released.”
“Copy, Minneapolis,” Kate says, because Waters has his face in his hands and is making tiny anguished sounds and can’t speak. “Thank you. Take care of yourselves, boys. This is Delta 236. We’re gone.”
Story Notes and Acknowledgments
IN THE INTRODUCTION I TALKED about some of the artists who most influenced me. One I left out was the novelist Bernard Malamud, author of The Fixer and The Assistant, who once suggested that a corpse in a coffin might be the perfect work of art, because “you got form, but you also got content.”
The first good short story I ever wrote, “Pop Art,” was heavily influenced by Malamud’s “The Jewbird,” and my ideas about collections were shaped