Swallow

As the plane was going down, he had all the symptoms of panic—a hysterical rush of endorphins, his skin flush with chemicals, a flash of nauseating disbelief, as the reality that death was actually upon him, all around him, in him—but he suppressed it, tried to control the panic as best he could because, even in that brief moment, he knew that panicking would not help him, could not save him, and that it would, in fact, only make the few seconds left of his life worse than what they were, which were the few, precious, taunting seconds left of his life, so instead, he swallowed very hard a few times, or maybe only once—it all happened so quickly that a swallow couldn’t even have been counted, but he remembered the act of swallowing, perhaps the cliché “swallow your pride” even flitted through his mind, while behind him, people screamed out in agony and disbelief; he could hear babies, and children, and mothers, and fathers, and single and lonely men and women crying, calling out desperately for help, or answers, or safety, which is why he tried desperately to think about his body, listening intently to his saliva as it was descending through his throat, and after he thought about swallowing, he tried to think about his lungs inflating and deflating, he thought about his breath and his breathing and words and religious chants and vows, he thought about syllables and sounds and swallowing and words and forming understandable communicative sounds, and he thought about how those sounds were unanimously understood as words, which were thoughts, which were electrons shooting among neurons in the brain, connected to the spinal chord connected to muscles and nerves and skin and face and lips and tongue--h e certainly did not think of his children, or if he did, even for the briefest of moments, he pushed the thought of them out like a breath, and then he thought about breathing again, until the moment when he took the microphone from the control panel, thinking—quickly—wanting so dearly to say something, say anything, not to calm down or pacify all the people in the plane that would die with him within moments, but just to say something, because behind him, everyone was moaning, and cursing, and ripping the plane apart, searching for oxygen masks, or life preservers, or crucifixes, or everyone was passing out from the shock of it all, or perhaps couples were digging their nails into each others’ necks, shoving their hands in their pants, clawing at legs and thighs, or perhaps they were all holding their heads with both hands and screaming, “Our Father, who art in Heaven..” as they violently descended from the clouds into hell.

---
(k)