It’s Story a Day again!  Anyway, my usual caveat: this is a very rough first draft.

So, here we go. This is actually the prompt for tomorrow, a Fourth Grade Spelling List.

(Since these are the same prompts as May: I wrote a very different story with the same prompt in May: https://notwhereilive.wordpress.com/2016/05/02/story-a-day-may-day-two/)

---

Parallel Play

Marilyn stood at the window, leaning against the frame, watching the airplanes take off and land. She was early, she was always early, she couldn’t help herself. The airport was small, but felt cavernous in its emptiness.

It felt like it had been such a long time since Ginny had left on holiday, although it hadn’t been, it just felt like it. It had been hard, watching her go and having to remain. But Marilyn had responsibilities that Ginny didn’t understand. Frankly, Marilyn had not thought it would be that difficult, but it was. Ginny liked the idea that Marilyn was the mayor of their small city. That was fun, everyone knowing Marilyn, all the invites and parties. But she didn’t appreciate the level of commitment  Marilyn had to her job. That it wasn’t just a job, not really. She was truly committed to being mayor, it was a vocation.

She wondered why she was here and whether Ginny would be happy to see her. She knew she was going to have to listen to a very lengthy discourse on the topic of Ginny’s trip and that wasn’t appealing.

She wasn’t sure if she really loved Ginny or not and that was probably the biggest reason why she was here. She would know, she thought, when she looked in the other woman’s eyes. She would be sure, she told herself. She had gone back and forth, laying blame on herself and then on Ginny. But it wasn’t either of them, she supposed. They weren’t really well suited.

They were novelties to each other, they did not gain anything from each other, they did not raise each other up. They just existed in a mutual space. Parallel play, her daycare provider mother would have said. At best, it was like a relay, with one picking up what the other had put down.

Marilyn wondered if she was working up the courage to break up with Ginny as soon as she stepped off the plane. It almost felt like it, but she also knew that, rather than distance making the heart grow fonder, the longer they were apart, the more the distance became a state of mind as well as a fact of geography.

She was pacing now, back and forth along the walkway in front of the window. Splats of rain now hit the glass, one and then another. She hoped it wouldn’t rain much, or at least not yet. The rain would come in around the window, she could see the stack of pails in the corner. It was an ongoing problem at city council. She couldn’t escape them.

Her hands rested on her waist, she didn’t know what to do with her arms as she went back and forth.

Soon, Ginny would be here soon.

She didn’t know why, later, why she looked out the window when she did. It was just another plane coming in. But the right airline, maybe it was Ginny.

But there was something amiss, she thought as the plane approached. She wouldn’t pretend to know much about flight and landings, but she had flown enough. It seemed too low or off-centre or… It didn’t matter, the nose hit first, not the wheels and there was a crashing sound, a metal tearing sound and it spun and turned and didn’t come to a stop quite yet.

And the rain came harder and there were red lights flashing and flames, there were definitely flames.

Marilyn would have no clear memories of the rest of the evening.