Dream Sequence by Adam Foulds

Author:Adam Foulds
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2019-04-06T16:00:00+00:00

2

Flight

It was time to go. The number of her boarding gate had appeared when the screen refreshed. There it was. Kristin started walking, following the signs. It was easy to do, clear and flowing. She fell in with others walking, a movement of people so patterned that with a little swiftness, a little joy, it would be dancing. An electric vehicle beeped and carried past an infirm person wearing huge glasses and a baseball cap. Kristin hadn’t been in an airport for a long time but many of her dreams were set in airports—in this very one—and part of her lived always here with the miracle happening, or about to happen, or failing to happen, while travellers blurred around her and she could somehow feel with heightened senses the heavy machinery of flight arched overhead.

The miracle had happened in this very airport and now she was back inside it, back inside the central magic of her life, on her way to see Henry again. She had visited the spot where it had happened earlier, where the watches glittered behind glass. The watches appeared in some of the dreams, too: she would hear them, chirruping, intelligent, their bright faces attentive to the moment, eternity come to see.

Moving walkways bore her forwards. They bounced underfoot. She held her coffee cup, her backpack on her shoulders. Soon she was at the gate, one of the first there, and she found a good seat facing the desk. She took out her phone and texted Suzanne. In the airport. All good. Waiting to fly! xx.

Through the enormous window, Kristin could see what must be the plane she would be getting on, tethered to its tunnel. Above, there were golden clouds. Kristin became engrossed in one, the silence of its slow, pouring transformations, stretching and gathering, flaring at the top into wisps that vanished. So much beauty if you only looked. Around her the few people in their chairs, dressed in soft leisurewear for the long-haul flight, didn’t see. They looked instead at their phones, at books, at the floor.

Two years ago, after Ron had initiated the divorce and they were no longer living together, Kristin had come to this airport to fly down to the islands with Suzanne and Linda. The plan was for the vacation to be defiantly celebratory, drunk and outrageous. Kristin had been the first to arrive. She went to the check-in desk. She opened her bag for her passport and printed booking confirmation and had also found Spiderman. This had all come back to her entire when she went to the restroom in the airport earlier. Everything that had been broken into unconvincing pieces with strenuous recollection and partial reappearances in dreams had come together again. They still had the same brand of soap in the airport bathroom, a soft-serve of scented foam deposited automatically in your palm when you triggered the sensor. When Kristin had smelled it again earlier she had remembered standing there in tears, cooling her face with water, washing her hands.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.