Stanzi—Saturday Morning—Family Vacations

It’s impossible to sleep naked in an invisible helicopter. It’s possible to fake it, but impossible to actually do it.

Patricia sang through the night. She wrote a song about being free right there, curled into a ball on the floor of a homemade helicopter in the middle of the night. She has a beautiful singing voice.

Gustav looks twice as tired as he did yesterday. He’s shivering.

“I can sit near you or something. Keep our body heat up.”

“You can’t move. We’re balanced.”

At this, Patricia laughs.

“It won’t be long now,” Gustav says.

“It won’t be long until what?” I ask.

“Landing.”

“But it took us nearly two and a half days to get there.”

“The journey back is half as long,” he says. “Isn’t that what you always say about the vacations you take with your parents?”

I look down at my scar again.

It opens its mouth before I can put my hand over it. It says, “I don’t go on vacations. I lied to you.”

“Where do you go?”

In my head, I explain everything to Gustav and Patricia. Out loud, I say, “I write you postcards, but I never send them.”

“But you said you lied. I don’t understand. How would you get postcards if you’re not on vacation?”

My scar talks. It tells them everything about my family vacations. Everything. Where we go. Why we go. How the world is falling to pieces.

I ask Patricia if she’s still happy to come back with us. “You were in a safer place,” I say.

“Safety is a lie. It’s a ham sandwich without the ham,” she answers.

“It’s a blue sky on Monday when it rains on Wednesday,” I say.

She says, “I’m so sorry about your sister.”

I daydream with my eyes closed. There are four coffins. Mine is red, Mama’s is blue, Pop’s is green. The fourth coffin is half the size of ours. It has a unicorn painted on it, and a rainbow. Mama and Pop are lying with their eyes closed, but every few seconds they peek out to see if I’m sleeping yet. So I pretend to sleep, and when they are convinced, they get up, join hands, and head to a big coffin that is propped in the corner. When they open the door of the big coffin, I can hear the sound of people laughing and talking and clinking glasses. Only when they close the door behind them do I squint and see that the big coffin is Chick’s Bar.

And it’s just us here now. Me in my red coffin and her in her unicorn coffin.

There are wombats everywhere.