Snow Gate
by Justin Nicholes
Snowflakes sailed in tight suicide spirals against the Minneapolis-St. Paul terminal windows, then slipstreamed in retreat. Aimie ricocheted into a row of seats that a family of three had colonized. The row was closest to the windows and reflected the mob behind them that lounged in snow-bound pause, suffering the world’s worst television show: AA910 to Cleveland, Delayed.
The second vodka tonic, a double, had degraded her aim. Her hip skinned the armrest when she dropped into the grime-gummy cushioned seat. Jet fuel exhaust soured the air. A burp escaped, tickled her nose.
The girl beside her was maybe thirteen, blond hair pony-tailed without mercy. A cinnamon scent, lip gloss. A cream-pink headset clamped over her ears. If a wire were attached to the headset, Aimie thought, it would lift the girl from the snow-crushed airport and deposit her into the hands of God.
“I used to be you, you know.”
A puffy-eyed face, free of affect, ignored.
“That’s no way to greet a future self.” Aimie rocked side to side as if snuggling herself in.
The girl rested her feet, long socks to mid-shin, on house slippers. They were also candy pink, with rabbit faces, floppy ears and carrots angling by paws. Maybe an early Christmas gift.
“You can be different. You can say No to the places he’ll try to take you.”
Outside, front-end loaders hummed in passing waves, stacking drifts. Men yelled somewhere. Laughter about the snow.
The girl’s mom, her face to an e-reader, lifted her eyes. Aimie felt those eyes on her in the reflective tableau, then scanned over her shoulder for the cop, barrel-chested with Kevlar and gear, who’d monitored the security chutes. He was just disappearing among the escalators. At the bar, Aimie had lifted fingers to the officer as he passed two, three times, trailing Brute and a hint of mint gum. In minutes, he’d be looping back. Cops made her think of warmer climates.
Specifically California. One Christmas, Aimie and her own mother and father had stayed at her grandma’s in Santa Cruz. Monarchs, equipped with inherited coordinates, migrated there in winters, swarming its eucalyptus microclimate. Her dad had been arrested there.
Maybe she should shut up.
Tinny pop jangled from under the girl’s ear cushions. Aimie knew that song.
She said, “You have a chance to get it right.”
Mom was leaning over to Dad now. His chin sagged to his chest. Aimie recognized his fat-veined forearms from the TreeTop Bar pod down the terminal. He’d been the one who’d supplied her that second drink.
Where’d Mom been then? With the cop?
She laughed through her nose. Mom had been with her daughter, of course.
“Men,” Aimie whispered. “Kept me cooped up in a two-bedroom bath-and-a-half.” She caught a slur, licked her lips. “They think you can arrest time, but time just—sploosh.” She pushed her arms forward to replicate the rushing of water. “Then they blame you.”
Mom was preparing to act.
Aimie itched at her stomach, where an agitated butterfly tattoo in purple and jagged blue stretched below the navel. If she lifted her hips and slid out of her jeans, the butterfly’s wings would spiral along her inner thighs, to points along the outline of her butt. It overwhelmed the right men, the grade-school sports-excelling, with their hurrying beer breath, harsh hands, bad grammar. She still had this bedroom superpower, but where had it gotten her? A taste for liquor that stayed hungry, soured finances, a restraining order that blew a defensive bubble around her as breakable as make-believe.
Mom hissed, “You always do this.”
On the tarmac beyond the glass, two trucks chugged along the runway. The first lugged a snow blower attachment shooting drifts into a trailing dump truck.
Mom rattled the girl’s thigh with nails caked with pink. She jumped up, trailing dusty scratch marks on the girl’s skin, and switched spots with her daughter.
As Mom sat back down, she hovered her face in front of Aimie’s. Blue stony eyes in hard pan challenged. A whiff of halitosis.
Aimie held the stare and found no love.
“Hello!” Mom said. It sounded like, Wanna die? Curly hair jiggled around her face as if she’d slammed the brake pedal.
Aimie stood up. Goodbye.
In the twirling terminal, under a snow-blind dome bowling skyward, movement began behind gate check-in desks. Workers in uniform, golden pins of authority, rattled fingers over keyboards. Groups of travelers stood ugly with territorial anxiety. Maybe Aimie would get to Cleveland after all. Her mom waited there, her dad. Nausea slowed her stride.
She banked into the tiled women’s restroom. It stank of dehydration, chewing gum, soap foam. In the farthest stall, her stomach and thighs enclosed the butterfly.
She’d been twelve, thirteen, around the same age as this girl when they’d wintered in California. At a park, the monarchs had mobbed together, sagging branches. Overwintering, their reproduction was paused. To Aimie, their chastity imbued them with a half-alive quality. They were wood chips, bark flakes skittering from trees, as much as delicate life forms.
The butterfly undulated when she stood. Aimie inspected her face at the scum-cornered sink. She soaped her hands. The missing ring on her left still activated a panic that she’d lost something important. One wrong turn had buried her twenties.
Someone else was in the bathroom. The girl stood at the threshold, far enough out to retreat, far enough in to catch its scent. She had taken off the earphones.
“They never listen.” The girl’s voice was a tight blast of heart and lungs.
Here was Aimie’s chance. If she could restart at thirteen, what would she need?
The girl said, “I tried to stop them. I said you’re nice.”
“You tried?” Weren’t coordinates what she’d wanted from the start?
Breaching the restroom entryway, the gear-rattling cop stood in black-blue.
He said, “Talk with me for a bit?”
The girl jogged toward her parents. A line was forming for boarding.
“We got a call. Luggage unattended.”
Sunshine over the horizon glared across the tarmac. Light glowed from the jetway. People descended in single file.
“How much have you had to drink?”
“Not enough,” Aimie said.
Dad’s oversized t-shirt stuck, damp, to his shoulders. The girl shrugged her own shoulder away from Mom, who, behind her in the worried line, had laid a territorial claw. That’s okay, Aimie wanted to say. You have to feel what you’re breaking from to know where you want to go.
“The airline’s rebooking you for tomorrow. This way.”
All along the hallway, people cleared temporary space. Airline associates spoke hurried blurs. The tarmac, black and slick, spread clear now. A plane taking off nosed westward.
Aimie stretched to look behind her. She met the girl’s eyes as she descended the jetway. I’m nice, she thought. It felt exhilarating to breathe. Her muscles tingled with potential energy.
“Whoa.” The cop clamped onto her upper arm. “Let’s keep going.” A puff of gum and Brute in her face. A familiar voice. “Do you have someone that can get you? Do you have a place to stay?”
Her aim steady now: “What I have’s a date with a cop.”
BIO: Justin Nicholes never declined Budweiser past midnight in Dresden. Read him in Cleaver, Flash Boulevard, *82 Review, plus others. Author of indie novel River Dragon Sky from Hong Kong-based Signal 8, and of the super-academicky Creative Writing Across the Curriculum, dude did an MFA at Wichita State.