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Miriam knew she needed to fly when she lost her fifth baby. Those luminous nights, the pearl moon casting shadows across the village as she took flight; her arms spread, her body soaring, undulating through the air currents as she went higher. Higher so that she could no longer see the village, and the space in which she existed seemed at once foreign and yet her own. This was her nightly journey, the one that might save her. For seven nights she existed in this liminal space, anchored to her bed, anchored to the idea that there was another Miriam who had overtaken her, one who existed in the bed of clouds that blindfolded the moon.
It was on the eighth morning that she heard the airplane she knew to be in trouble. Roused from a morning nap, the sound familiar living so close to the airfield at Hackley Aerodrome and Flying School. They’d become accustomed to the planes, but this sputtering was new and it pulled her, still weak from the blood loss, from her bed. She grasped the heavy drapery that kept her room as night and squinted at the intruding light. She opened the window, surprised at the soft, balmy air and looked skyward for the airplane that now seemed elusive. There it was, a choking sound that told her it was still up there somewhere.
She reached for a dress from the wardrobe and was soon clothed, the first time in over a week. She barely knew where she was going as she stumbled down the stairs and outside to her bicycle.
She was sore, and stiff, and in a weakened state but the sun was out and this surprised her so much that it was enough to keep her moving, and soon she was out on the road, right onto the High Street, then left on the Guildford Road that took her out of town in the direction of the aerodrome. Out in the open she looked ahead, scouring the sky for any sight of the plane and spotted it ahead, teetering eastward. She pedalled toward it, trying to calculate where it might come down.
***
“It’s coming,” she’d told Edmund, a month ago when she was still able to take in the world around her. “War. What we hear is only a fraction of what they know.” The chatter in the village like constant static.
“It won’t come to that, love,” Edmund so sure, as if he had a direct line to those in power.
***
After five minutes, she spotted a stile where she sat after leaning her bicycle into the hedge. What would Edmund think of her, out roaming the countryside like this? A week of nursing her back to health only to lose her to a failing airplane.
The airplane.
The quiet meant the engine was no longer running.