Alternative Endings
for Pierce Gerety
In my simplest imaginings the plane
winks out on a finger snap
or at the end of a lightning spear:
Poof! a full manifest tugged out of the sky.
Here. Then not.
Or perhaps it is snipped free
by a clever splice of the reel:
the excision of 229 humans
with the swipe of an X-Acto blade.
The reality was not so simple;
it wasn’t even as direct
as an explosion, a killing instant,
leaving a scattered debris field
and rumors of a bomb.
No, not even as simple as that.
It was a fire.
And the fire spread
(here is where I want to stop imagining)
and the pilot prepared the crew, and
the crew prepared the cabin,
giving him enough time
to look out the window, to watch
the approaching gray-black water
and think: my wife, my sons, my daughter
before the impact that
no life vest
no oxygen mask
no emergency light
no inflatable slide
into the ocean
will mitigate.
When we finally get there,
to the real vanishing act,
it is soured, an anxious taste
already in our throats
from swallowing the portent,
the knowing,
the terrible five minutes of knowing
after everything we’ve done
and been through,
this is how it ends?
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Editor’s Note & Image Credit: See the Memoriam for Pierce Gerety, about the September 2, 1998 crash of Swissair Flight111, and the inevitable according to NTSB. Image of a jet plane flying during sunset [pikwizard.com]
- Alternative Endings by Justine Gardner - September 19, 2022