The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories

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We have been circling the city now at an altitude of between seven thousand and ten thousand feet for, according to our best estimates, around twenty years.

I once asked the Pilot — this was early into the hijacking, maybe a week — how we were doing in terms of gasoline and how he planned to refuel, but he did not tell me. He laughed and patted me on the shoulder as if we were good friends together on a road trip and I had just asked him how we were going to get there without a map. Back in the cabin, I asked a man who was an engineer if he knew how we had managed to stay aloft for so long, and he gave me a complex explanation, most of which I did not understand, centered around a rumored “perpetual oil.”

“Is there such a thing?” I asked him. “Perpetual oil?”

“Well,” he said. “I’m not sure that there isn’t.”

The Pilot called my name over the intercom a number of times before I realized it was me he was calling for. By the time I figured it out, the other passengers were leaning into the aisle and stretching over their seats to see who it was being summoned. I stood up and a low murmuring passed through the cabin. I suppose everyone assumed I was being called to be executed, since the hijacking had just happened a day or two before and we hadn’t been told anything else by the hijacker since. There had been speculation about demands, about actions, about executions, but nobody knew, really, what was going to happen. I didn’t blame the others for thinking that I had been called in to be the first casualty, as I had assumed the same. But why me instead of the man in front of me or the woman across the aisle or anyone else on board, one of the flight attendants maybe?

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