Airports
American Toilet Paperby Joseph Fleckenstein
Over the years, I have been abroad on numerous occasions. Most trips were for the purpose of transacting business while others were for pleasure. As o...
Featured story
by Catherine. Dube
The Red KiteMilo found a red kite tangled in the old mango tree behind his house. Its tail was torn, and one wooden stick had snapped. He almost threw it away, but something about its bright color made him carry it insid...
Read story
Points of departure
23 stories match your filters.
Airports
American Toilet Paperby Joseph Fleckenstein
Over the years, I have been abroad on numerous occasions. Most trips were for the purpose of transacting business while others were for pleasure. As o...
Airplanes
Threshold Altitudesby Al Scott Pearce Baker
To fly is to forfeit identity. What boards the plane is not what leaves it. In the sky, the self disintegrates. The body persists, but the soul enters...
Airports
The Air of Liminalityby Alyx Marroquin
I’m convinced that airplanes, airports, and everything to do with them exist out of time. They are liminal spaces that hold everything transitor...
Airports
Freefallby Damari Esqueda
I remember only two things from the first time I rode in an airplane. One: my mom took two dramamine that knocked her out, a precaution so her eardrum...
Airplanes
November 53577by Erik Bittner
It’s pinned to the plaster ceiling over my desk, which my wife doesn’t like so much, but I put it there so I could look up and always see...
Airplanes
Plane Rideby Barrie Cole
I was on a plane once a long time ago, and the woman sitting next to me had never been on a plane before. She was young, perhaps nineteen or so,...
Airports
The Travelerby Yvonne Osborne
He was slim and well-dressed with a nice haircut, not too short, not too long. He wore a black tailored jacket and well-made jeans. His black leather...
Airplanes
Skywardby Jason Weiss
What could be more peculiar than flying in an airplane? No matter how many hundreds of times we’ve joined the procession to file into that big m...
Airplanes
Altered Statesby Scott Zukowski
I wake in an altered state as we descend from Phoenix into JFK. My cylinders fire, my spindles spin, my cogs turn, but the time surrounding the machin...
Airplanes
Prayer, Dream, and Flightby William Stobb
Boarded but stuck in a delay at the gate, I see that one of my ex’s posted a picture of her Bible in sunlight on her old wooden table—some...
Airplanes
Beneath the Starsby Andrew Chinich
I’m not sure when I realized the depth of my love of flying but I got hooked early and it’s lasted a lifetime. In 1941, my father was just...
Airplanes
Contrails Lead Everywhereby Peter Bracking
I am a space-race child. I was an Elroy. From a very young age I was aware of the sky. The television and radio were filled with spacecraft and astron...
Airplanes
The Poetry of 1,000 Feetby Lara Lillibridge
When you fly at a thousand feet, you see the world differently. Commercial planes fly at an anonymous altitude, so far up that houses become invisible...
Airplanes
The Sun Risingby James Stafford
“Pay attention, boy! Get on the other side so we can push her out.” I skittered under the belly of the darkened airplane and grabbed her s...
Airports
Girls Without: Brussels to Bujumburaby Giulianna Di Nenna
Life-searching questions arise at night, after sunset, and not just on park benches along river banks. Watching rushing water, reflecting upon it...
Airplanes
Flying Toward Mann’s Tadzio at Christmasby Tasha Cotter
When I read that Thomas Mann likely chose the name Tadzio because it held the word Tod, which means death, I felt satisfied, but then I noticed a gauz...
Airplanes
NAS to BWIby Monica Aust
I’ve been flying all my life; in fact, I even flew in utero, when my mother was pregnant with me, when all I’d ever known at that point wa...
Airports
Field Notes from a New Terminalby Randy Malamud
It’s simulation day at Atlanta’s new Maynard H. Jackson Jr. International Terminal. Fifteen hundred people with nothing better to do have...
Airplanes
When It Comes to Flyingby Lydia Buchanan
I could tell you about the time that my family and I had to make an emergency landing in Colorado, amidst silver-suited firefighters and then had to s...
Airplanes
Cloud Hoppingby Phyllis McKinley
“You go first, Nana, to break a path.” These are my instructions from six-year-old Josh. I plunk onto a sled in the sub-zero Canadian air...
Airplanes
The Aerial Viewby Jessi Probus
Communities can be drawn, created, discovered, inferred. But communities can also be overlooked. There is a community of people who are all in airplan...
Airports
The Power of Beauty Foundby Fargo Kantrowitz
I remember the snow. I wasn't brought up on snow back in the deserts of Las Vegas, but in Boston they had a lot of it. I remember it sitting in th...
Airports
Sky Bridge Ogreby Jacqueline Jules
Dragging my portable closet on wheels I follow a line of tense travelers whining over boarding delays and tight overhead bins until reaching my slende...
Have a story to tell? Share your story.