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I glimpsed many fine planes resting at their gates. Jet bridges nuzzled their temples, their rear ends pointed provocatively toward me. A beefy Boeing 777 pulled back from F4, pivoting on his slender ankles, with surprising grace for such a big fellow. Linda makes $20 an hour as a content moderator, flagging comments that violate a tech conglomerate''s terms and conditions. Each night, she returns to the windowless room in a garage that she rents from a family who pretend she isn''t there. But once a month, she escapes to San Franscisco International Airport for clandestine meetings on the cheapest flight out that night. It''s not pilots but planes that draw her there, with their intelligent windscreens, comely slats and playful turbulence - a trip on a Boeing 737 makes her feel a way that no man ever could. Focused on uniting with a plane in fatal matrimony - vulgarly known as a plane crash - Linda finds it hard to relate to other people. So when her charismatic colleague Karina invites her to join a group of women using vision boards to manifest their desires, she can''t resist the chance to hasten her romantic fate and maybe make a few friends. But having disguised her true wishes with socially acceptable alternatives, Linda has to deal with the consequences when her vision boards start coming true a bit too literally . . .
About the author
Kate Folk
is the author of the short story collection
Out There. She has written for publications including
The New Yorker,
New York Times Magazine,
Granta,
McSweeney's, and
Zyzzyva. She's received support from the Headlands Center for the Arts, MacDowell, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Recently, she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University. She lives in San Francisco.
