Jetlag

[NPR 3-Minute Fiction, round 7]

   Folding attic stairs had been pulled down from the ceiling so the heavy boxes could be pushed

up them one by one, then shoved across the floorboards to form a shelf against the western

slope of the roof. The boxes, uniform light-brown rectangles with the weight distributed evenly

among them, were full of books, but also of photo albums (the missing photos were in a bulging

envelope she had placed in the middle of the suitcase) and mementos to show her children

some day.

   The suitcase had no wheels or straps, just a handle. At first she put too few things in; her father

said it would rip. Then she added winter clothing until it pushed out too far and her mother said it

would rip. She pulled out a bulky sweater she would never wear anyplace but home and tucked

it back into the bottom drawer of the pine chest, on top of the blue and white scarf a senior boy

had wrapped around her freshman neck when he kissed her at a high-school basketball game

in the gym.

   She stood surrounded by her family as she watched the suitcase bounce and jerk its way along

the conveyor belt, then she stood surrounded by her family at the entrance to the security corral.

Finally she stood alone before the wall of departure panels, waiting in the lounge.

   Outside the arrivals exit stood her friend. Next to her stood an unfamiliar man, hugging her

friend familiarly. They all kissed each other’s cheeks, but did not hug. Her friend chattered,

eagerly waiting for her and the man to become friends. She smiled and rubbed her eyes,

apologizing for the jetlag. Lunch would be at a place the man knew out by the river. They would

drink sangria.

   In the one bedroom of her friend’s tiny apartment, she unloaded her things on the twin bed

nearest the wall. Because there was no desk in which to place her passport, her envelope of

photographs or her notebook and pen, she stowed them in the underwear drawer. The rest of

the clothes she hung in the section of closet she’d been allocated. There was a folding shelf for

shoes, and her empty suitcase, requisitioned as a repository for winter blankets, was hoisted

atop the closet.

   Her friend gave her a small tour of the medicine cabinet and the half-kitchen’s half refrigerator.

She was shown where the packaged food was stored, where the plates and glasses were

stacked, and where the purse with money for household expenses was kept. With a smile, her

friend led her to a small shelf beside the black and white television set and placed the airplane

novel between a treatise on contemporary political thought and a dictionary.

   She stood out on the wisp of a balcony hours before dawn and breathed in the foreign smell

of dry plateau, diesel and black tobacco. The empty street was bathed in an orange glow. She

listened to the grinding buses blocks away and then the steady drone of a Vespa, and thought

how impossibly far away it all was.