Something Like Belonging

The doctor exhaled deeply as he leaned back into his seat. “I’m in a field of petunias.  I’m fishing at Lake Tahoe.  I’m at home in my Sleep Number Bed.  I am relaxed,” he thought.  Really he was hundreds of miles off the ground in an unsettlingly uncrowded plane, and this fact made it impossible for the doctor to relax.  He discretely reached into the pocket of his khakis, wrapping his fingers around a little plastic bottle of Xanax.  He looked around the cabin to make sure that no one was looking at him, but just as the doctor was about to twist the lid off of the bottle, he noticed a woman staring at him from a few seats over. 

The woman had tiny black eyes hidden beneath enormous puffs of wrinkled skin.  At first, the doctor was unsure if the woman was really looking his way or if the shadows cast by the bags around her eyes simply made it look as though she was staring, but the mere thought of someone watching him was enough to make him withdraw his hand from his pocket.  The doctor picked up one of the ancient magazines from the back of the seat in front of him, flipped it open, and pretended to read an article about poverty in Burundi.

The woman had been staring and continued to stare as the boney, graying doctor feigned interest in a magazine article in order to distract from his obvious discomfort.  The doctor reminded the woman of her second husband, who had spent most of his life worrying about money.  “Hilda, I just don’t know if we have the money to be buying the deli cheese,” he would say to her, as if the seventy-eight cent difference in price could be the difference between a comfortable retirement and sleeping in an alleyway for the rest of his life.  He had been a dentist, and he had died of a heart attack at age forty-one, never reaching the cushy retirement that he had worried over for most of his life and without ever truly being able to enjoy a slice of deli cheese.  Hilda had always felt sorry for her second husband.  She felt sorry for the doctor, as well.  She had a thought that she would go up and sit next to him.  She would put her arms around him.  She would say, “hush,” and everything would be better.  Hilda decided to remain in her seat. 

The doctor looked back at the woman, hoping that she had finally turned away or fallen asleep.  She had not, but when the doctor looked back at her, she caught the nervous desperation in his glance and turned to look at someone else, hoping to put him at ease. 

There was a girl in a wheelchair toward the back of the cabin.  Her legs were long and spindly.  She had all the appeal of a spider dying a slow death due to malnourishment.  The girl in the wheel chair looked bored, as teenagers often do.  She would have liked to listen to her headphones, but she had forgotten to pack them.  Had Hilda known, she would have offered up her headphones, but of course, there was no way for her to know this.  Hilda continued to stare.  A thin middle-aged man in a royal blue tracksuit, perhaps the father of the girl in the wheelchair, sat next to her. The father sat rigidly in his seat, a brutal hunger forcing his face into a scowl.  Hilda thought of putting her arms around the father and telling him “hush,” the way she’d imagined comforting the doctor, but the “hush” was not quite enough.  Hilda would have to kiss his forehead; she would have to say, “Regardless of what you think, you are loved.”  She thought that if she did this, he would turn into a teddy bear, something soft, something less angry.  As Hilda tried to imagine what the father would look like as a teddy bear, he turned to her and glared fiercely.  Caught by surprise, Hilda felt a tickle when the glare hit her.  She made a sound—a half giggle, half gasp.  It went like this: Gah-aah!


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To read the rest of the story, visit https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/175850 or look up Calla Lilies by Holly Combs on Amazon.com and download the e-Book.