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They sat side by side at the far end of Terminal Three where the gate numbers ran out and there was nothing beyond the glass but wind and sky. Overhead, the fluorescents made pale ellipses on the floor, and the windows bore the damp breath of the gray day beyond. The tannoy announced cities in three tongues and none of them meant anything anymore.
He held the boarding passes in one hand like an accusation. She thumbed a small book she had not opened in days. Their flight would begin boarding soon.
“You want to eat something?”
“No.”
“You haven’t eaten all day.”
“I’m not hungry.”
He looked at her. Four years they had been married. Or near enough. Some nights the marriage had seemed older than them both. He folded the paper slips into his coat and turned toward the window. The plane sat at its gate, with its flank gleaming and the nose dark and inscrutable like a thing bred not of man but of silence and fire. Engines idle. Tugs moving like ants at its feet.
She was watching him. Or watching the space near him. The book closed in her lap.
“We could have stayed longer.”
“You said two weeks.”
“You didn’t want to come here at all.”
“No.”
“But you came anyway.”
He said nothing.
* * *
When they boarded the plane, it was already near full. The economy cabin buzzed with the low burr of voices and the latching of overhead bins and the click of seatbelts. She took the window seat without speaking and he slid in beside her. In the center aisle a child cried without tears and a man coughed into a blue cloth again and again. The air in the plane was close with heat and aluminium and time.
The engines spooled up. The fuselage groaned. He glanced at her as the plane began to taxi and she did not meet his eyes.
Outside, the tarmac fell away, and then the runway, and then the green edge of England itself. The city faded in a gray mist as the plane climbed into the cloud.
* * *
The food came. She pushed the tray aside untouched. He drank both cups of water. She turned to him.
“You think this helped?”
“What?”
“Germany. The trip.”
He stared at the seatback ahead of him. He watched it as though something lived there.
“I don’t know.”
“I wanted it to.”
“I know.”
* * *
They had walked in Berlin along the cold river where the wall once was. They had stood in church ruins and in museums and among crowds of laughing strangers, and all of it passed between them like air between glass. He had bought her a scarf in a small shop in the shadow of the Dom. She had thanked him but never wore it. There’d been snow in the mountains. Near Füssen they’d stood beneath a castle in a soft white dusk. She’d reached for his hand and he’d given it to her, but the moment had passed like a gust of wind through curtains and then it was gone.
* * *
“You think we’ll be different when we’re home.”
“No.”
She closed her eyes. The book lay unopened between them.
“What do you want me to say?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s all I’ve got.”
“Good.”
The flight attendants moved quietly through the cabin. The lights were dimmed. Somewhere ahead someone snored. She leaned her head to the window. He looked down at her hair, the place behind her ear where he’d once laid his lips without speaking. He folded his hands. Closed his eyes. Outside, the darkness lay wide and absolute. The stars cold and impersonal in their vigil. A great hush rode the skin of the world.
* * *
The man in the seat across from them was telling a story. His voice was soft but persistent, like a man talking not to you but to time itself.
“I told her I’d be back by Christmas,” he said. “Didn’t say which year.”
The woman beside him laughed and coughed at once.
“I reckon she figured that out by now.”
Ellis looked over. The man was older. Mid-sixties. Wearing a blue flannel shirt and a frayed ballcap that read USS Independence. His hands trembled faintly when he moved them. The woman had a red scarf and gray curls, and she smiled at everyone who met her eyes. He’d noticed that earlier.
“I heard them talking,” Shauna said.
“Yeah.”
“You think they’ve been together long?”
He looked back. “No. I think they met on the flight.”
She smiled faintly. “Figures.”
The plane lurched a little. Just the wind, just the sky, just turbulence. A baby stirred somewhere far back. The lights above them dimmed and glowed again like uncertain stars. She took his hand. He looked down at it.
“That’s not nothing,” she said.
A knot of concern in his guts. He said nothing.
“I don’t want to be angry anymore,” she said.
“Alright.”
“I mean it.”
He looked at her. Her face drawn with exhaustion. Her mouth dry. The red welt beneath her wedding band.
“Me neither,” he said.
A sharp ding. Seatbelt sign on. An attendant passed swiftly down the aisle. They glanced at each other. The attendant didn’t smile. A whisper passed behind them. One voice, then two. Someone stood and was told to sit down.
The pilot’s voice came on the speaker. Calm, American.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve encountered some light turbulence ahead. We ask that everyone return to their seats and fasten seatbelts until further notice. Cabin crew, please secure the cabin.”
Then silence again. But not just silence. A sense of listening. A waiting thing.
“Ellis.”
“Yeah.”
“Something feels—”
She didn’t finish.
The man who had been speaking earlier talked once more to the woman beside him.
“They ever tell you about what air pressure does?”
“What?”
“To the cabin. If something goes wrong.”
“No.”
He didn’t say anything else.
Ellis looked at his wife.
“You okay?”
“I feel… something’s—”
And then the light went out.
* * *
A low sound passed through the fuselage. Like a deep moan from within the bones of the aircraft itself. A vibration that started in the soles and rose through the seat and into the spine. The air changed. A hollowness in the chest. Like all the wind in the world was going somewhere else.
Ellis looked around. No one spoke. The baby cried again. Shauna took his arm hard.
“Ellis.”
A sound like a god drawing breath. Then the world split open.
* * *
There was no fire. Not at first. Just a void. The cabin ripped in two. He saw her face lit not by light but by a sudden terror so ancient it had no words. Then nothing.
The sky took them all.
* * *
He woke to cold.
To the sound of his breath torn from his throat.
A wind shrieking past him that did not change pitch or direction and he knew then he was falling. Not dream. Not vision. Not purgatory.
He was falling.
Ellis opened his eyes. Sky above. No, below. The world turned wrongside. There was no ground. Only the night. Vast and cruel. His seat was still strapped to him. The fuselage gone. The floor gone. Nothing but open air beneath his boots.
“Shauna!”
He turned his head and felt his spine twist in its socket. In the dark he could barely make her out. Still in her seat. Her hair flailed in the torrent. Her eyes wide.
“Shauna!”
She could not hear him. He tried again. She looked at him. Mouth opened. Closed. She reached for him and could not.
They fell. They fell through a black sky that held no memory of flight. She mouthed his name. Or maybe it was a prayer. Her lips moved but the wind stole everything.
He shook his head.
“No!” he shouted. “No, no, no!”
She reached for the clasp. Tried to undo it. He screamed. She could not hear.
“Shauna! Leave it!”
She looked at him.
He reached out. Stretched across the sky. His hand shook in the thin air. His ring gleamed like a star in the sunless firmament.
“You with me?” he roared.
She nodded.
A shape passed them. A man. Arms spread. A wheel from the undercarriage spinning alone like some unmoored planet. Smoke unfurling. Bits of paper and clothing and steel all turning in the sky like ash from a ruined book.
“Are we alive?” he shrieked. Weird question, Ellis he said to himself.
Yeah. He could see her mouth it. Yes. We’re alive.
They continued to plummet.
You remember that summer we met? she mouthed.
He nodded.
That lake. With the little dock.
“Yeah!”
I was scared of diving. You said you’d catch me.
Somehow, he managed a smile. “Did I?”
You did. You caught me.
He nodded.
She looked down.
You gonna catch me now?
“Yeah! Yeah I am!”
Promise.
“Promise!”
Through the black night the ground began to show its vague outline. A green-black quilt sewn with frost and chimney smoke and the red sprawl of roofs. Tiny, childlike. As if nothing bad had ever happened there.
He looked back at her.
“Shauna!”
Yeah.
“Close your eyes!”
No.
“Do it anyway!”
She did.
The seat shuddered. He felt the fall shift. He thought of her hands on the Rhine glass, the way she had cried when the violin started at that café in Cologne, as if the song had been waiting in her bones since birth.
He shut his eyes. And he whispered her name. One last time.
* * *
The boy was feeding the dog. A cold night and no promise in the sky but what the clouds chose to keep. The lambs were penned and his father still gone to Carlisle. He poured the feed into the dish and watched the dog sniff at it with disinterest, then nose it aside to look up at him, and then past him.
The boy turned.
A low sound, strange and long. Not thunder. A different breed. The dog dropped to its belly and whined.
In the next second, the sky opened. It did not scream. It did not flare. It tore.
A huge shape drawing closer. Smoke trailing. Debris spinning like gulls over a dead sea. Then the house on Sherwood Crescent took the brunt of it. A roar like the voice of the earth itself and then a bloom of fire so hot it melted windows a half mile off. Roofs lifted from houses. Doors unhinged. Bricks spat across gardens. Fences torn up and turned to kindling.
And then silence. Not stillness. Not peace.
Silence.
A mother just north of Rosebank had been folding laundry. When the wall came in, she was crushed beneath the radiator, her hands still inside a child’s shirt. A man was flung from his garage into the hedge across the road and would not be found for hours. The nose of the aircraft landed in a field full of sheep, its skin peeled like an orange, its cockpit open to the wind. The sheep wandered among the debris without sound. One bleated and then fell dead, shrapnel lodged behind the eye.
In the crater where the wings hit, the fire raged for seven hours. Kerosene soaked the soil. Cinders drifted through the air like something biblical. What had once been a town looked like the mouth of a mine. Old women clutched their shawls. Children wept and were hushed. The fire burned out the heart of Lockerbie and left behind nothing but a wound.
One man walked into the wreckage, bare-headed, dressed for the holiday he had expected. He stood at the edge of the crater, arms limp, watching the flames chew the street where his brother had lived. No one asked him anything. There was nothing left to ask.
And still, the sky gave.
A body fell through the roof of a church. A girl in a yellow dress, seat still buckled to her, landed in a garden and did not bleed. A suitcase burst open beside a fallen tree, its contents scattered: a paperback, a blue shirt, a spool of red thread.
In a hedgerow just past the village, a farmer’s wife walking with her head down stopped at the faint outline of two chairs in the dark. They sat upright in the mud. She moved closer to the chairs. In one of them was a man. And in the other, a woman. Still strapped in. Their hands burned. Their clothing torn. But they sat as if in witness of some great and final tribunal. As if they had fallen from heaven and landed not in judgment but in grace. The farmer’s wife dropped to her knees.
“Oh God” she whispered. “Oh God.”
The eyes of the woman in the chair were closed. The man’s were not. He looked at the sky. And the wind stirred the collar of his coat. The farmer’s wife reached for his hand. It was still warm. A lamb bleated behind her. The wind shifted. Smoke rolled over the village like a tide of grief. And above it all, the moon remained hidden.
* * *
There is a field beyond the town. It is green in spring and brown in winter and no one tends it anymore. No one walks there save the wind. And in the wind are voices. Not many. Not often. But they come. A man might be walking the fence line and stop and turn and find nothing behind him but the length of his own life and still he’d know. He’d know he was not alone.
Ellis Beckmann walks there. The sky low. He walks with his hands in his pockets and his head bent. There are no wires here, no fences, no calls to make or miss. Just the field and the rush of all things broken. He stops when he sees her. Shauna. Standing at the edge of the hedgerow in the same clothes she wore on the flight. Her hair pulled back. A book in her hand. The pages fluttering in the wind that does not touch the trees. He walks to her. She does not move. He stops a few feet away. She looks at him.
“Is this it?
He does not answer. He looks at her hands. The book. The way she holds it. She speaks again.
“Are we dead?”
He closes his eyes.
“Yes.”
She nods. They stand in silence. The wind moves the long grass. The clouds crawl across the sky like ash on water.
“Do you remember the Alps?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“We should have stayed there.”
He shrugs. “We didn’t.”
She laughs, softly. “We never stayed anywhere.”
He turns and looks at the land behind them. A hill. A copse of trees. Nothing more. Yet it seems older than the world. “What now?”
“Now?” she says. “Now we walk.”
“Where?”
She doesn’t answer. She starts down the field. He follows. Birds rise from the brush and wheel in a soundless sky. They walk for what might be minutes. Might be years. Time has no dominion here. After a while she stops. “Look.”
And there in the distance is the plane. Whole. Sitting on the field like some forgotten ark. No scorch, no tear, no ruin. Just resting. Waiting. He stares. “Is that real?”
She smiles. “It doesn’t matter.”
He nods. And they walk toward it. The field parts before them. Above them the clouds open just a little. And light spills down like a benediction. In the silence of that place there are no tears. No fear. No more questions. Only the sound of steps. Two souls moving forward. Together now.
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AUTHOR BIO:
John Leahy is the author of three novels—Harvest, CROGIAN, and Unity. He has received three Honourable Mentions in the Writers of the Future Contest, and his short story Singers appeared in Flame Tree Publishing’s 2017 Pirates and Ghosts anthology, alongside work by writers including Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. P. Lovecraft, and H. G. Wells. A past prize-winner at Listowel Writers’ Week, his story Do You Dream of Oil? has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He lives in Killarney, Ireland.
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WHY WE CHOSE TO PUBLISH “The Road Beyond Sky”:
In this different piece, author John Leahy takes us on an interesting journey. We love the cinematic approach of this piece. It begins outside the main characters’ perspective, then slowly zooms in to them and their conflict, where he does a splendid job of putting the reader into their minds with tight dialogue.
He moves the camera in and out at the right moments to let the reader see everything in a way that feels natural. Then at the end he gives us the close perspective to show them resolving their conflict. Although the story is a tragic one, it delivers an unexpected and satisfying ending.