By Steph Coelho
You’re not old, or haggard, or washed up. Your crooked smile is youthful, even if it squishes out the crinkles around your eyes. Gravity will start to compress the bones in your spine, eventually, but for now, your feet still reach the pedals, and your brain still knows what it knows, like the names of all the buttons in the cockpit.
Menopause has your uterus in a chokehold, hormones unpredictable, haughty. The taut-skinned Gen Alpha girls are on the ground, eyes glued to live feeds. But you have the clouds at your fingertips, eyes tracking the sorbet-colored horizon.
It won’t be long before you reach Halifax and touchdown to kiss the grass-lined asphalt. A quick peck to say: Hello again, I’m not here for long, so don’t wait up.
You flew this route with your instructor yesterday. Today, you’re seeing everything for the first time: the glittering bay, tiny moving cars like flesh-filled jewelry boxes, pom-pom conifers that remind you of crafting. The plastic container of pipe cleaners and glue gun sticks is still in the closet. Destined to be dug up someday, evidence of the lengths mothers went to be enough.
Headset tight on your head, hands at the controls, you glimpse the area where you’ve been instructed to land. The butterflies in your mouth spread their wings and sing: We have just emerged from our chrysalis. They taste like beautiful cotton candy. You smile as you make the descent, curled lips plucking at your creased skin.
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Steph Coelho lives in the Greater Montreal area. Her fiction and poetry often explore themes of existential dread, the horrors of the everyday, and body politics. Her work has appeared in the Tidewater Press 2025 Anthology, Emerge, and McGill’s The Veg literary magazine. You can find her online on Instagram @stephcoelhowrites. She also publishes the weekly creative writing substack Prompted (https://prompted.substack.com/)