EXCERPT FROM ‘SAFE HOME’

Cuauh dives in at an angle, on a slipstream, with his left rudder pushed full to the carpet and his ailerons turned firstover-lap so the plane falls fast and loud, the up-gush of wind roaring high through the idled propellers, the plane like a screaming vulture descending crooked into the remnants of the neighborhood. Five hundred feet, four hundred feet, and he’ll kick out the rudder to right the plane just before impact. He’ll land it clean and free onto a street named Nahual where the crumbling targravel and rock splatter up against the nickelplated underbelly of the plane behind the thrust of the cooling twin flateight Lycoming piston engines still revved to a thousand RPM.

The wingtips, fortyeight feet from one tip to the other, scrape along the thresholds of the houses on either side of Nahual Street. The power lines roll up and stretch over the bump of the cockpit. All the birds move to either end of the line, unimpressed by the smoking four hundred and fifty horsepower engine threatening to suck them in. The driver, too, waits unimpressed at the end of the road.

The driver is always the one asking questions. The driver is both Cuauh’s ride home and his interrogator, his friend and his enemy. How was the flight? Any messages to be relayed? Any peculiarities along the way? Are you sure? Are you sure? he’ll ask. Cuauh knows the routine, and he knows better than to incriminate himself on what he did or did not see from the skies. from “Safe Home” by Daniel Peña