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  • Spell Me the Air
  • Charles McLeod (bio)

When marcy was a pilot, everyone was under her. She circled the city in her single-engine craft, which was her heart, which she told to people. Past the left wing balled clouds bunched like balloons. The moon trilled, its light juice. Marcy could hear it. Her memory was a worn wooden wagon of yams, and when the plane bumped from some bit of rough air, one would drop onto Marcy’s brainpan, and she would see it. Sidewalk hopscotch, Marcy would say, whiplash from your talented suntan. Elegant in her evergreen gown and gold grasshopper brooch and dimpled brass bracelet, Marcy would bank the plane west, the dials’ hands saluting. There were shells on a shelf by the bed in her room. There were thuds of red wax from the cheeses she’d eaten. Marcy’s big goggles were older than her. The birds clucked by the shack, Marcy said, then descended.

Eye level with the lip of the roof of the Wynn, the lights of the Strip looked like the head of a pin had been pushed many times through dark blue construction paper. For Marcy, the world past the world was backlit, the rim of a sun that fed her. She had so little she hadn’t lost much. The trade off for this was what she kept around she didn’t mind having taken.

In the craft’s tiny cockpit, her silk scarf serpentine, Marcy looked down at the palm trees and fountains and limos. She liked the desert—no rot and no sod. Just rocks upon rocks and small bursts of buildings—tall, fancy tin where the men begged and spent, where they bet and they hummed and they bedded. Cramped in their clasps, sleek as bobsleds, they laughed at their jokes and had always just eaten. They squirmed and they panted, a goblin index, a zigzagging pigpen of future granddads whose hair would turn gray from their hushes and goshes.

Marcy turned north, the tarmac ahead. The city’s long neon wash trailed out over the sand, past the green blinking light on her starboard. Two weeks ago, she’d turned twenty-three, but Marcy’d been flying forever and ever, the blacks of her eyes twin seas on a map, the veins in her arms like their rivers. The miles that she logged weren’t distance but sound, the desert not dirt but language. The farther she traveled, the closer she got to her past, and in this way Marcy’s future had almost just happened. [End Page 302]

The first thing Marcy lost was her decoder ring. Plastic, gold-leafed, it was born in the milk of her cereal. Marcy had finished her puffed corn and then raised the bowl; the school bus would be on the road any minute. Past the window was South Carolina in spring, the light on the green, the cardinal bright brown or bleeding. Behind the tool shack was the back of her mom’s man’s Stepside, a black-and-chrome stamp on the forest. Marcy closed her eyes and gulped down the pink-white, a ridged plastic hint on the skin of her flume. Marcy, just ten, sponged the ring clean. Her mom was a winter sun, soft but gone often, and through the long darkness of each day’s between, the black of the Stepside got blacker and blacker, the hole wanting only more of the same, eating everything so that nothing could ever be eaten. Marcy’s dress had a pocket at one of its hips, and Marcy dropped the ring in like a wish, like a secret. The truck’s engine began as she walked down the road. The hole always took her to the same lake, and Marcy would be sure to look out at the shore and the waves while it happened. Sometimes Marcy wondered if the ring was still there, lost under the rain and the snow and the leaves. It made Marcy mad that she never wore it.

Fourteen began on the back of a train, the scream of the tracks like the wailing inside her. Birmingham was a respite...

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