—I’M SOLD, I’M GOING ON CLEAN    

          My mother is afraid for me, but my stepfather says, “He’s going to be a man soon.  If he wants to go, let him.”

       So I’m on the plane alone.  A stewardess with white skin and orange hair keeps leaning around her work station to smile and wink at me.

       The man in the middle seat has gas and smells like cow manure.  He wears a smudged ring and I wonder if he’s someone’s father.

       Where I’m flying to is flat farmland.  Acres of wheat.  Tractors and combines.  In the winter the snows get so deep that locals drive snowmobiles on the streets instead of cars.  I’ve never been, but I know because my blood father wrote me long letters that I’d find torn up in my parent’s trash.  

       When I tell the stewardess I’ll be nine in June, her smile lifts like it’s a hard trick she’s doing.  “I’ve got a daughter just your age.  You’re pretty brave to be flying by yourself.”  I don’t agree, but I don’t say so either.  I just think I’m maybe desperate.

       I saw an old film reel of a man walking across the wing of an airplane as it flew in the sky.  After a while it got boring, but then the clip changed and he was pedaling a unicycle while gigantic gusts threatened to toss him off.  My stepfather called the man a jackass and said, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.”

       The stewardess brings me a ginger ale.  The bubbles won’t stop popping over the rim of the plastic glass.  “What are you going to do in North Dakota?”

       I tell her my real father lives there.  I tell her I’ve not seen him in person that I can remember.  I don’t tell her that my stepfather hates me and I hate him back.  I tell her lots of things, except how I’m on this bird and I’m never returning.

       I’ve lied to my mother about this trip.  She thinks my father will be waiting for me at the airport when we land.  She thinks he helped plan everything and that I’ll only be gone a week.  Lying’s not as easy as people think.

       The man beside me pulls out his laptop.  He holds it close to his chest, flat over his huge belly.  There are all kinds of naked women on the screen.  How he thinks I can’t see them is a wonder, or maybe he doesn’t care.

       After a while he gets up to use the restroom, so I take his cup of coffee and pour half of it over his laptop’s keyboard, then set the cup back.  If he asks, I’ll say it was the turbulence.

       When I look out my window, it’s a wall of white and the clouds are threatening to suck up the wing.  I imagine that I’m out there, riding a unicycle and that people are watching, that they care.  I pretend they’re cheering and shouting my name and this makes me the happiest I’ve been, maybe since forever.