On the biggest loop of the coaster, I throw up in my mouth.
Ryan promised he’d fix my fear, threw his arms wide like the chair-o-plane which whirled in circles, making me dizzy with its spin. Before I boarded, he hugged me close, swooshed a bottle from empty air like a magician on TV.
'This'll help,' he said, and I believed him. He swears I’ll be with Sasha soon, serving drinks in a smart red suit at thirty thousand feet. ‘Sky’s the limit,’ he says.
I believe him. That's what happens when you find the one. Mum said you just know. And I do. I think.
By the third loop, my stomach’s doing its own rotation. It’s ok though, ‘cause I’ll be cured. Like Sasha. You wouldn’t believe she’d ever been afraid of anything. She made it all the way to business class. Up more than she's down.
'You've got to not be scared, Lil,’ he said. 'You've got to trust me.'
I get confused between the got-to and the got-to-not-tos. He said we'd got to before, so we did. After, though, he’d barely look at me. Until today.
At home, he wraps me in a blanket, makes me a strawberry milkshake. I can’t look at it. My stomach’s still fifty feet in the air, a pendulum ride stuck at the top.
Later, when the bleeding comes, he says it’s meant to be.
He buys a toy airplane, says there’s a mini-me inside serving drinks, puts it on my bedside table, right where the scan used to sit.
As if she never existed.
At night, I trace the edges of my stomach’s empty nest. When he’s asleep, I sing softly, picture her curled like a comma, asleep in the bed of a cloud.
Abi lives in Brighton by the sea. In between teaching and writing mini stories, she enjoys running slowly up and down hills and playing complicated board games. Her words pop up now and again, and have been spotted in Splonk, Ellipsis, Reflex Fiction and The Molotov Cocktail.
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