Portland flights arrived at 12:35, 3:16, 6:46, the baggage handlers ready at wheels-down, having already flipped a coin for who’d gut the plane of last-minute checked bags and who’d deliver them to the bridge, where the flight attendant—their attendant—bid farewell to passengers, and even when someone else was in her place, the handlers would feign a moment on the Jetway for each other’s benefit—a wink flashed between shuffling passengers, a flutter of fingers at her hip—until it was days, then weeks without a sighting, suspicions becoming fears becoming fact—she had switched routes or airlines or professions—and so the stories themselves became the thing, retold until each word and pause was perfected, the details too real not to be true—a fleck of pink on a tooth, a stocking run shaped like California, a Tom Collins shared in a hotel room—details later told to girlfriends who became wives, by which time the handlers had also moved—to Sacramento, to Duluth—the attendant’s name changing from telling to telling (in truth never known at all) as each other’s names inched just beyond reach, until, ticket in hand, they could watch a plane greet the tarmac with neither regret nor urgency, without anything at all but a sense of the shifting distances between once and now and to be.
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