fiction by Dana P. Diehl
He stood in the mouth of the hanger, his back to the girl in the green rain jacket.
“Any minute now, Deb. You’ll hear it first. Then right there, over the mountain, it’ll come.” His voice was low and tense. “It’ll just be a silver speck at first. You’ll have to look for the sun glinting against it. Now hurry, come out by me. You won’t see anything from in there.”
The girl took slow steps out of the hanger, avoiding pools of rainwater, iridescent purple and blue with the sheen of oil that had collected in the cracked cement. Wind swept the runway, carrying with it the smell gasoline and coffee and leather.
“Deb, look. There it is. Do you see it? Over the tower now.”
She inhaled and looked at the sky. She remembered this smell from when he still lived at home. It would follow him through the halls, creating a cloud around their dinner table, clinging to the Lazy boy that was his. He’d shower, but you could never wash away the smell of gasoline.
“Come on, Deb.” He turned his gaze from the sky to look at her. Stubble, gray and black, shadowed his face, and he wore a navy, fleece jacket that she didn’t recognize. “You aren’t looking.”
The girl turned her eyes towards the peak of the control tower. Even when he had lived with them, even when he and her mom had still loved each other, her father had spent most of his time at the airport. This excitement and passion in his voice, it was reserved only for the planes.
“It’ll be on its way to the Harrisburg airport this afternoon,” he said, turning back to the hanger. “It won’t be coming back.”
She turned with him and looked at the ground. “I know.”
Dana Diehl is a junior creative writing major with a minor in philosophy. Her work has also appeared online in The Dirty Napkin and Novelletum.
Coming next week: nonfiction by William Hoffacker
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