Cigarette

She flicks her pen as if ashing a cigarette and leans back in her chair. Her hands grip at the armrests like she is preparing for impact and her mouth hangs open in a yawn. I'd like to turn off the volume right now and imagine that she is screaming. She's in an airplane, confined in a cheap plastic seat, three to five seconds from death; skyrocketing, plummeting toward earth. Her high-pitched screams are drowned out by the others around her, begging for some higher power to save their lives as the engines fail one by one. Eyes bulge and water; fingernails dig. The oxygen mask bursts out from above her straight black hair and dangles before her, occasionally smacking her in the face. I'd like to imagine that the last thing she thinks about, right before she hears crunching and shrieking of metal and is engulfed in a jet-fueled fire, is every single time she flicked her pen like she was ashing a cigarette.