1. Because you are on a plane, on the way home from your latest holiday with your wife. There is you and a sky and your wife and a cross-shaped piece of metal holding all that together, at altitude. It’s rattling. The rivets on the wings are cutting through cloud the way they should. (And through my ribcage, which can’t help imagining you). But the force it takes to manage that is staggering – the sheer dynamics of sitting at thousands of feet in your muted blue recliner, bolted into your silver belt, beside your wife who’s had 10 days of her memories blonded by coastal salt, who is so determined not to give up the getaway-halter of her bikini that she wears it like a thread of Pacific Ocean dangling from her T-shirt, beneath the layers of sensible air-conditioned fleece she’ll need to disembark. Your winsomely ageing ponytailed wife, who is able to eat from oblong hostess-issued plastic and sip from foil-sealed wine. Who is able to fiddle with the ceiling-mounted nozzle of coolant to channel the chill your way, so it reaches you like personal ozone, beneath your seams, along your sunburn. Who is able to smile at cabin pressure, always the next numbered seat beside you, nonrefundable, booked in for the rest of your life.
2. When I was a little girl I dreamed of being an air hostess. All I wanted was to glide up and down aisles, groomed, dispensing face towels and cocktails, handing out everything miniaturised, the passengers calming in the glow of my makeup. I think I wanted the uniform most, its formalised suit of sexy service, some kind of nurse-model-secretary-angel-waitress enshrined in figure-hugging cloth, with a regulation up-do ready for an aerial ballet, gilded tight to my skull with spray. Not even turbulence at 50,000ft could knock a hairpin out of place. In the event of engine failure, I’d appear in the sheen of the strip lighting, serenely marking the available exits, my lovely robotic elbows at right angles, gestures cued to deny the cold void waiting under everyone’s mask, everyone’s face elasticated into terror trained on the vanishing point of my nail lacquer. But emergency was of course unlikely. I’d tell my dolls that as I set them in rows in the lounge to stand in for long-haul passengers. My smile was a tiny soap opera.
3. I know you’ll message when you get back. You’ll queue through customs, you’ll look for a chance to text by the baggage carousel. I’ll get a couple of words while you watch the suitcases slide through synthetic flaps, make their squeaky mechanical progress past jet-lagged onlookers in a black loop. Stupid tourist-trinkets tied to them, like somehow scraps of fluoro tat can hide the fact that every damn bag is a functional zip-up dead ringer for the next one, something shrill and existential rising from the conveyor-belt drone, something about your life packed into black compartments, durable cases, silent wheels. You’ll dodge your wife by a couple of columns, text me something: touchdown. Something quick and offhand and loaded, while you wait to grab your life back by the sturdy telescopic grip.
4. Once, when my father was going away on a business trip, I climbed into his suitcase. He was dealing, calmly, with my mother down the hallway, while he sipped something bon voyage on the rocks, and made sure the leather slats in his briefcase were filed with all the relevant documents. My mother held extended nervous breakdowns every time he went overseas. I’d almost started enjoying them, ate cold macaroni in front of the TV, adjusted the volume dial to tune out her crying, stared at sitcoms like a silvery mirror. His suitcase could have held two of me. I liked the dark in there. I liked the polyvinyl taste of my breath reflected back off its heavy-duty lining. I liked the dry-cleaned stink of his suits and the little snakeskin jut of his shaving kit, with its wipe-clean hatch for cologne and its stubby little brush and its riveting shell cufflinks. But I cried when I couldn’t inch my fingers out of the lid to lock it up.
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5. When you get home do you think of the last time I visited when your wife was away, and we fucked, no questions asked, in her kitchen, not even caring the blinds weren’t drawn, so your neighbours could have wide-screened everything, from the instant you had me aloft by the flanks for a full 360 of airborne kissing to the second we landed hard on the sink tiles and came and came and came apart in brace position till our bodies shone? Do you think of that? Or do you just manoeuvre your three-piece luggage down the hall and listen to your wife fuss over the undeclared stash of foreign gifts tucked in among your resort clothes, hoping the ground crew hasn’t smashed the treats you bought your girls into so much long-flight confetti?
6. Once, I ended up coming home on the same late flight that carried your oldest daughter. We had figured that coincidence out before the date, so when I boarded I was prepared. I looked for an echo of your face on every young female passenger that hovered at the gate, that bared their midriff as they forced their backpack up into the overhead locker. I had an idea of the girl she’d be, a Kathmandu type, peachy, athletic. I somehow hoped she’d sit beside me. Maybe I thought I could strike up some kind of rapport, charm her into confidential camaraderie. Instead I got a leopard print woman in menopausal eye makeup who by the end of takeoff revealed that she was Jesus. And nobody got the window.
7. Of course, by the time my father got home I’d scamper for the door before his headlights hit the driveway. He always had a present for me, and the greeting ritual involved sweetly begging, dancing around and around his legs while he pretended he’d forgotten to go shopping and in fact his suitcase wasn’t burdened with anything unnecessarily pretty. When I’d nearly passed out with sugary pleading he’d finally relent and unzip, magicking out a bit of kitschy crap branded with his destination, and I’d skip around like Daddy’s little touriste.
8. That last time I lay in your bed, impossibly, there were fireworks. Do you remember that? Our silhouette still in spasm when the whole night shattered into sparks, boom after boom rushing down upon your house in glittery ambush. So we capsized and fell back naked, watching the ceiling dissolve into halo after halo. Because your neighbours had stowed them in their garage for months like a booby trap of dead stars.
9. When you moved, your body had a contrail of flame.
10. Fucking ribbons, fucking trinkets, fucking shreds of cheap-ass wrap, my father probably picked up last minute, with the last jangle of unconvertible change left in his big exec pockets, grabbing the first girly boxed-up passable junk that he could stuff in his carry-on.
11. When he got home my red-eyed mother was always waiting for her present too, usually something he could clasp on her neck where the dark veins were working while she said nothing.
12. You always call me when you’re away on business, and sigh down the phone a lot about restructures, deals in freefall, ongoing burnout, but also your stratospheric pay, the totally fucked but upwardly mobile quarterly bonus trajectory you’re jammed on, though you routinely drink to the bottom of the complimentary bar and think about just relaxing off the edge of the balconied five-star room they book you into. That’s a regular joke you crack: you, plummeting softly through the aeons of urban air, one tranquillised step in your quiet blue suit to a vertical solution.
Failing that, you Facetime me, and we comfort each other with a long-distance pixellated fuck.
13. Once my father did return with nothing. He said he’d bought me a life-size doll, a jointed extravagance he couldn’t resist, but he’d had to check it separately because it wouldn’t fit in his suitcase. And on layover he’d stood by the carousel and waited for its carefully packaged body to pop out the mouth of the chute where he’d grab it by the twine he’d lashed around its neck. He waited. But it never appeared. And he had to race to his connecting flight, and the next gate was miles down the midnight runways. So he scribbled instructions for where to post her and shoved them at someone official in a hurry, and only just made it to his plane. And when he got home he gave me a description of her lost-in-transit face, her delicate embroidery. And I had nightmares about her for months, turning and turning in her binding around the vacant terminal.
14. We Facetime fuck and we joke about which of us will tip over an international railing first.
15. On his next plane, the hostess was so upset when he told her about my doll, she asked the pilot to broadcast a plea over the intercom, just in case another passenger had seen it. Sometimes now, when I’m on a flight, and I can’t make out what the pilot is saying – though I lap up his stereophonic bass, its incomprehensible paternal crackle – I imagine it’s an all-points bulletin, still scanning the airwaves for my lost doll.
16. It was sometimes a plane ride to visit my dad, in the years after he finally left us. I felt very bold at airports – ticket folded into my very own passport, swinging a blood-red hard-shell suitcase entrusted to me by my uneasy mother, who left an insignia of fingernails on me before I queued up to get stamped for every trip.
17. Over the property where my father left us, a woman actually fell from a plane. Opened the door mid-flight, dropped out. Removed herself from the equation, evaporated. No one knew why. She was just there in the cabin, unspeaking, and then her side of the plane was empty.
18. I lie awake thinking about how you’ll inevitably fuck your wife while you’re on holiday, peeling her out of her destination T-shirt, after some package-deal kissing, and your wife tastes like SPF and piña colada and chlorine, and all the recliner-lounging has eased her muscles and her laughter open, and all the day tours to local markets and ocean trenches have gained her a tan, which she’s topped each night with fresh hibiscus whose stamens catch in her natural curl, so an offshore breeze acquaints your fingertips with pollen when you reach over at the buffet to grant her face the fan of your relaxed hand, just like the couples in the brochure, while all-you-can-eat is sliced and scorched and plated in the background between blazing torches.
19. My mother would try to outrun my father’s company car as he exited for the airport, stumbling the asphalt in assorted nightgowns that made her look like a sylph from the hood, torn at the ornamental wings off the chrome as his goodbye accelerated.
20. We sat outside in the dusk by your pool, and the neighbours, who you were ready to sue for harassment, sent up a drone that was their next running joke, a black appliance that dive-bombed and buzzed in the air as we nuzzled on the outdoor seat. It was hard to talk about love with that on the horizon.
21. There was a days-long hunt to locate the remains of the woman who fell from the plane. She was pressed in the grass, intact, a deep bed she made for herself, at velocity.
22. Every time I visited my long-distance father I would plan to talk with him, a talk that looked at it all from a great chilled height, that numbered the feelings into unhurt rows, that cut through the clouds of family history.
23. In that conference afterlife where everyone mills around the panoramic marble foyers, drinking replica drinks and writing replica jokes on their repurposed name badges, I’ve seen the fleets of girls, ranked like taxis, carrying business cards that itemise all the feats they’ll perform if they get paid. They look bored at their polyvinyl anarchy, their bubblegum Lolita routine, but they babble when any man strides out of the tower, acrobatic bonus offers. In the fluorescent tropical light they look like dolls that nothing in the world could melt.
24. I never talked. Just brought my mother’s case home, red right side smashed in by distance, metal rim warped to the point it could no longer shut.
25. What does your wife do with all the memorabilia, the junky icons collected on the trip? Does she amass them on the diningroom table, to hold on to the holiday mood? Does she dot them around her shelves, in all that curated companionable dust, where they can chat to other family good-times, ribbons for first, graduation snaps, gold stars? Is it possible to shut my face, and legs, and leave the two of you right there, happy with your knick-knacks?
26. It occurred to me, your wife might have plied the neighbours, arranged the flyover footage. She might have snapped, and asked them to run surveillance, wept as a last resort, shook on their white-trash couch and offered cash, begged them to let her hire their drone. Its lightweight rig was insectoid and twitching, and I turned to stare into its lens, unsure if I should wave.
27. Inside the suitcase, I think a little girl could be a bomb.
28. You circle and circle and circle the subject of eventually leaving your wife. I don’t know if you are dumping fuel. Or waiting to glance across and notice you no longer have a passenger.
29. After the crying my mother would pencil her face back on, like I did this morning, using the mirror I inherited from her to edge my eyes with two smoky black wings.
30. I’ve been inside this affair for so long now – I just need to shut the lid.
31. I tell my dolls to extinguish their crayon materials. I tell my dolls to secure their plastic-bag masks and their parcel-string belts. But they’re mostly all over the cabin. They’re mostly a runway of hair and nightclothes, screaming.
32. When I got off the plane your daughter was somewhere in the slipstream of strangers behind me. I passed through arrivals and yours was the first face I saw, waiting at the gate for her. Everything illuminated, hard, against the incoming surfaces, the chromium, the reinforced glass, the liquid acres of high-shine floor where neon infinity was travelling. I had to pretend I didn’t know you. I had to walk clean past, like your body in the knife-edge downlight was out of my orbit. I had to keep my back to everyone, until the hold spat my body bag out, then I had to drag it through the crowd like I wasn’t overcome by your gravity, like every particle adrift in my solar plexus wasn’t about to detonate.
33. Because I’m a debris trail.
Tracey Slaughter is a poet, essayist and fiction writer from Aotearoa, New Zealand. Her latest works are the poetry collection The Girls in the Red House are Singing (Te Herenga Waka Press, 2024), and the fiction collection Devil’s Trumpet (Te Herenga Waka Press, 2021). Her writing has received numerous awards including the 2024 Calibre Essay Prize, the 2023 Manchester Poetry Prize, the Fish Short Story Prize 2020 and the Bridport Prize 2014. She won second prize in The Moth Short Story Prize 2018, judged by Kevin Barry. She lives in Kirikiriroa, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Waikato and edits the journals Mayhem and Poetry Aotearoa
