Category: Stewart O’Nan

Stewart O'Nan

He didn’t like to fly–the noise and vibration gave him a headache–but, as with anything new, he was excited by the strangeness of it. The disjuncture intrigued him: stepping through a door in one place, sitting still for a few hours, then stepping out a thousand miles away. It seemed to him a very American mode of travel, even more so than the car, not simply going farther faster, but eliminating any temporal experience of the journey, skipping over whole sections of the country, the sole focus on arriving, with the help of expensive and arcane technologies, at one’s destination, except of course, when one didn’t–a thought brought on by his own instinctive disbelief and the bumpiness of the flight.

Stewart O'Nan

It was the ultimate cautionary tale, the moral being Don’t fall, as if they were made of glass. In a sense they were–their fragility was irrefutable, medically proven–and yet Emily detested the inevitable rundown of accidents and tragedies, the more fortunate clucking their tongues and counting their blessings, all the while knowing it was just a matter of time. She didn’t need to be reminded that she was a single misstep from disaster, especially here, without Henry, surrounded by the survivors of an earlier life.