Miss Wyoming Read Free Page A

hysteria and little other noise.
    Then the pilot regained control of the plane, and the harnessing of its reins made it feel as if its bulk had walloped onto concrete. The oxygen hoses swooned like cartoon water lilies, and the TV screens resumed playing
Cheers.
    For the next two minutes normal flight resumed. Susan felt some relief as Mr. Engineer described to Mrs. Engineer exactly why the plane would remain flyable.
    Then the descent began again, a descent as long as a song on the radio, a downward free float — smooth and bumpless. Susan felt as though the other passengers must be angry at her for jinxing their flight — for being the low-grade onboard celebrity who brought tabloid bad luck onto an otherwise routine flight. She avoided looking at them. She put on her seat belt. She felt clenched and brittle. She thought,
So this is how it ends, in a crash over Lucy's hometown, amid syndicated TV reruns, spilled drinks, and moaning engines. Once the plane hits the ground, I'll no longer be me. I'll go on to being whatever comes next.
    She felt a surprising relief that the plastic strand of failed identities she'd been beading together across her life was coming to an end.
Maybe I'll blink and open my eyes and I'll find myself hatching from a bird's egg, reincarnated as a cardinal. Maybe I'll meet Jesus. But whatever happens, I'm off the hook! Whatever happens, I'll no longer have to be a failure or a puppet or a has-been celebrity who people can hate or love or blame.
    Then, like the yank of a cyclone roller coaster, the plane sheared and bounced and slid into soil. The noise was so loud that it overpowered all other sensations. The visions she saw came at her fast as snapshots — bodies and dirt and luggage strewn toward her as though from a wood chipper — the screams of tortured metal and compressed air. And then silence.
    Her seat had come to a stop along with a section of fuselage. The engineer, his wife and their two seats were …
gone.
Her chair rested alone, bolted to its piece of fuselage, perfectly vertical. She was still for about a minute, a small plume of smoke rising far off to the right. She smelled fuel. Gently she unclasped the seat belt of 58-A and rose to look across a fallow sorghum field. A brief survey of her body showed she was unscratched, yet it appeared to her that all the other passengers were crushed and broiled and broken along a debris path that stretched half a mile across the sorghum field hemmed with tract housing. There was a brief gap between when her plane crashed and when people began streaming from the suburb toward the wreckage. During that moment Susan had the entire plane wreck and the crumpled passengers to herself, like a museum late on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. The bodies around her seemed as though they'd been flocked onto the plane's hull and onto the gashed sorghum field from a spray can. A clump of unheated foil-wrapped dinners covered a stewardess's legs. Luggage had burst like firecrackers and was mixed with dirt and roots and dandelions, while cans of pop and bottles of Courvoisier were sprinkled like dropped marbles. Susan tried to find somebody else alive. There were limb fragments and heads. The sootcovered fuselage contained a cordwood pile of dead passengers.
    She felt like a ghost. She tried to find her bodily remains there in the wreckage and was unable to do so. She grew frightened that the relationship between her mind and body had been severed.
    Teenage boys on bicycles were the first to arrive, dropping their bikes as they began sleepwalking around the perimeter. They looked so young and vital. Susan approached them and one of them shouted out, «Hey, lady, did you see
that
?! Did you see it come down?» to which Susan nodded, realizing the boys had no idea she was a passenger and didn't recognize her.
    Then she was lost in a crowd of local onlookers and trucks,
parp
ing sirens and ambulances. She picked her way out of the melee and found a newly paved