Drawing Blood
Hospitals all smell of the cleansers they use to ineffectively cover the horror.
My mother was dying, but we didn’t know that yet.
Visiting the grand/mother, who rarely stopped working long enough to visit, no one knew quite where to sit in the little room with the cryptic white board, the beeping machines.
Nurse enters announcing, “You’ll have to leave now, I have to draw her blood.”
Relief to all but J, who at three years-old, grabs a notebook and Hello Kitty markers from the backpack, draws Grandma’s blood on a slip of paper and hands it to the nurse.
“Did it for you.”
Flights
1920: Amelia Earhart flew in a plane.
1921: Amelia Earhart bought her own. People were barely owning cars yet. And she bought a plane.
1974: I don’t remember my first flight. I was a baby. I remember my first helicopter ride. I was terrified. They had taken the doors off “because it was a nice day.” I was 8.
1975: I was a on a flight where the pilot lost control and I looked out the window and saw the ground, parallel to the pane, coming up towards me. In an alternate time line, that could be my last memory.
1986: College Spring Break, I flew to Ft Lauderdale on People’s Express redeye out of Newark. The flight attendant crashed the steel credit card cart into my head as I lolled into the aisle. We drove back in a rental car.
1932: Amelia Earhart crossed the Atlantic, alone. She broke records.
1987: I flew back from London on a flight with many legs. We broke no record and I wrote postcards about how bored I was during my 4 hour layover in Cincinnati Ohio which is really in Kentucky? The things you learn.
1996: I flew first class from Washington DC to Hawaii for my honeymoon. While we waited at baggage claim with all the other newlyweds, grooms spinning their bands awkwardly, brides showing off French manicures, we marveled at people stretching uncomfortably while we felt refreshed from the flight.
2019: I flew to Nashville on Southwest. There’s really not a lot to say about that. I flew there, I flew back. There was no turbulence. The airport food was bad. There were a lot of Pokémon in the airport to catch. That was a highlight.
1937: Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific.
2020: Flying became unsafe. The virus. The closed in space. The recycled air.
2020: March 13 was the last time I set foot in a store, because I’m afraid. The virus is airborne, they say. The Pandemic.
1918-20: There was also a Pandemic. A third of the world got the flu. 10% of them died.
And yet, in 1920, Amelia Earhart got on a plane.
And she flew.
She flew on and on and laughed at fear. Sneered at “safety.”
And then in 1937, she disappeared.
In 2020, I disappeared, too.
Hildie S. Block (she/her) is a night owl, a writer, a teacher, and a little obsessed with the weather. Her day doesn’t start until after one cup of coffee with a little NPR. She lives in Virginia with her family and her axolotl named Xipe! Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Salon, Cortland Review, Gargoyle, (and about 50 other places), won the 2022 Washington Writer’s Publishing House Holiday contest and recently in Instant Noodles, Maryland Literary Review, Big Whoopie Deal, Grace and Gravity/From the Attic, Fahmidan Review and Mason Jar Press’ Jarnal. When not writing, she’s teaching, previously at George Washington and American Universities and currently leading workshops at the Writer’s Center www.writer.org and on her own www.hildieblockworkshop.com