Three cans of tuna, a blueberry-cashew trail mix, and four cans of Campbell’s Chunky Soup clattered in her bag, a floral messenger bag her kids bought her for Christmas stored in the flight attendants’ station, as the plane tipped slowly to the left.

Three-ounce shampoo and conditioner. Dove soap.

Store-sealed Fruit of the Loom bikini briefs in black, beige, and white, each pair curled tight against the plastic packaging like little fists.

A small eyeshadow palette and two miniature hand sanitizers.

Jennifer ran her fingers over each piece of her survival kit. A vein beat in her neck, and she heard its acceleration in her ear.

Her fingertips grazed cool cans and slick plastic before her right middle finger hit it. The handkerchief with long-stemmed daisies embroidered along the edge. She sniffed it—it stopped smelling like her mom’s perfume so long ago, but this was habit—and stuffed it in her pocket.

She stuck the lipstick in her pencil skirt’s pocket and flattened the front of her vest. Jennifer then dug her hand into the station’s icebox to throw more ice into her already-stocked drink cart. The red icebox scoop shook under her restless fingers. Her kids would be frustrated with this pointless task. Sheila and Tony, her kids, her loves, had made it clear that it was “pointless” for their mother to continue manning flights. “No one is allowed to fly anywhere right now, Mom, just come home.” They ended calls with a rushed “Be safe” as if her job had started becoming unsafe in the pandemic.

Tonight wasn’t pointless, however. Jennifer had two passengers to take care of: one woman in a grey business suit with a Burberry plaid mask, and a man, unmasked besides his hands obscuring his face. He wore a pink sweatshirt, a neon color bright as a light to contrast his pose of statuesque despair, and his leg bounced like that cartoon rabbit in Bambi. (Her kids had hated Bambi, protested against it, but once Jennifer had stuck it in the VHS player in their wet-smelling basement twenty-so years ago, they all watched and cried and laughed together.)

The attendant button rang from C3, first class. “Hurry, please!” Jonathan teased.

“Why don’t you get it yourself?” Jennifer said. Her elbows hit both sides of the attendant’s station as she turned to look at him.

From her tiny cabinet station, she spotted Jonathan and imagined that if first class was full like it would’ve been in any other March, Jonathan still would have stood out. He slouched in the cushioned seat so low his head reclined on the chair’s mid-back. His attendant vest billowed away from his chest under his poor posture, his tie undone and sashed over his shoulders. “Can you please treat me like one of your passengers who just wants a vodka cran?” he said.

Jennifer raised her eyebrows. “No ‘please,’ Jonathan?”

He sat up to hit the overhead attendant button again and collapsed his broken position. She snorted.

Jonathan and Jennifer had worked this Las Vegas-to-Chicago flight enough times to develop a trust and a routine verbal jousting. He was a sprout, only started two years ago, but his new beard hid his young jaw and aged him. Jennifer had that grizzly-bear instinct to watch out for him. The danger was that he knew it.

“Let me get the real passengers first.”

Jonathan called out a “C’mon” as she rolled the squeaking drink cart by him. She could hear his exaggerated groans as she stepped out of first into business class, the rows of empty seats only punctured by Burberry and pink. Pitch-dark except the grayish lights above her passengers, the cabin and its empty seats were as intimidating as a flight full of customers. Jennifer’s heart hitched into another gear, and she wrapped her fingers around the cart handle like vines.

Burberry Mask asked for Diet Coke, the can please without the small ice cup, and no pretzels. Jennifer said, “You’d be doing us a favor by off-loading some of these.” Burberry returned to her phone and let her quiet sit in the air between them as a goodbye.

Pink Sweatshirt, still face down in his hands, didn’t look up as the squeaking cart wheels stopped next to him, but Jennifer did notice his leg had stopped bouncing. His chest inflated and deflated within his bright pink sweatshirt.

“Can I get you anything?” Jennifer whispered. She didn’t want to shock him out of his concentration, but her whisper punctured the even hum of the engine in the economy class’s solitude.

The man shook his head in his hands: no.

“Not even a water? Some pretzels? We have way too many pretzels.”

He paused then nodded yes into his hands. He leaned back into his seat to flip his tray down as she cracked open the two-liter Dasani and poured him a brimming cupful.

“Would you like two?” Jennifer asked.

He paused, looked up, nodded. Pink Sweatshirt had three creases across his forehead, and under his eyes, skin bulged like a frog’s neck. Jennifer had expected his eyes to be bloodshot, as if he’d drained himself of tears—she had served all types of criers, and she pegged him as the stoic type that refuses to let anyone anywhere see the one tear crystallize in their bottom lashes—but they were dark brown and deep. She had subconsciously snuck her hand into her pocket to run her finger over the stitched daisies. She was too close to him.

“Is there anything else I can help you with?”

Why had she asked that? She imagined that maybe he’d been on his way to a funeral, a last-minute forget-your-mask-and-go flight, a despairing devastation of some sort—but what if he had it?

As a flight attendant, Jennifer perfected her conversation points. She knew the routine, the welcoming way to smile. She wielded the safety demonstration props like another piece of her body, a Western bandit’s rifle. A few times, people steeped in sadness had taken this last question as a therapeutic release, an unfurling of what they escaped in the air, and Jennifer smiled and comforted them as best as she could. Yet here she was, opening herself to this unmasked man’s grief, to breathe and weep and fling spit droplets on her mask.

He shook his head.

“Well, alright,” Jennifer said. Was he alright? Her heart boomed in her chest. “Let me know if you need anything else with that button above your head, and I can be back in a jiffy.” He nodded. She pushed the cart back to the front of the plane, past Burberry and back to First Class.

Wheeling the cart in to the station to Jonathan’s mock applause, Jennifer decided to grab two Tito’s nibs, a plastic cup, and a Minute Maid cranberry apple can for Jonathan. She poured herself a black coffee in an insulated cup. She walked up the aisle in a heavy, unflattering way—no longer the light-toed swish of Flight Attendant Jennifer—and she handed him his drink components, wrangled in her five fingers of one hand. She set them up on his tray table and cracked the little vodkas’ tops, poured them in, then popped open the cran-apple can to pour it on top.

“This is top-notch service right here,” Jonathan said.

Jennifer sat next to him, across the aisle, closest to the window. The coffee’s warmth glowed and filled her palm. It tasted burnt and scalded her tongue, but her pulse in her ears faded to the background. She peered outside into the melting winter of March. The highways like white veins of a nation disappeared, a hibernating land.

Jennifer couldn’t stop thinking about that Pink Sweatshirt’s breath, circulating within the cabin, mixing into their pores.

“I love this job.” Jonathan now had his feet perched on the shoulders of the chair in front of him. “People who are scared of flying.” He scoffed, a back-throat scorn for the passengers they had who needed pills and neck pillows and sat edgy like caged animals.

“My mom told me after she’d retired—and we had never worried about her flying ever growing up—but she always wondered at the start of any flight if they just boarded the plane that crashes.” Jennifer said it quietly to Jonathan in case her words could be heard by the passengers, circulated over the engine’s staticky hum. Jonathan didn’t say anything for a moment.

“I get that,” Jonathan said. “It’s that rush. One thing goes wrong with the pilot or anything and pew.” He made a small explosion noise.

She warmed with pride. He got it, too. Her kids had chastised their grandma: “You can’t think like that, ohmigod, Gran, you pessimist!” But until you stand before a crowd of half-interested passengers watching you demonstrate how they can save their own lives—announcing that if something happens, it’s every man for themselves, and their attendant couldn’t possibly string all their masks on for them, couldn’t even do their kids’ masks, so choose what happens to you—because your plans to see the Bean or eat deep-dish pizza, your loved one waiting at their house for your Uber to pull up, that hope of catching up and rebuilding that connection across different hometowns, all the months of tourist websites and hotel comparisons and tedious checking with your loved one about what should they do and is deep-dish pizza actually any good—does it matter if you can’t fight for yourself?—you understand that what happens in the air is that thin line between here and whatever happens next.

The daisies’ yellow stitches in her pocket soothed her fidgeting thumb. “You junkie,” Jennifer said.

Jonathan laughed, lifted his double cocktail, and tipped his cup for a mock-cheers. His bearded smile in these empty COVID flights had been a relaxed one, an acceptance that ran across his smooth face like an open parenthesis. Jennifer tipped her cup in Jonathan’s direction, a little salute, and stared out the window, watching the United States as she floated in the atmosphere they created.

Chloe Cullen has been published in TINGE, Short Edition, and Kalliope. She won the 2019 nonfiction Writing the Non-Human contest and has freelanced for Finding Your Chesapeake and Penn State’s Sustainability Institute. Chloe completed her English masters and broadcast journalism bachelors at Penn State. To stay updated on her words and rejection letters, follow @ischloeawriter on Instagram.