Creative Non-fiction by Jacqueline Doyle
We couldn’t get seats next to each other on the return trip. My husband and I always hold hands on takeoff and I missed that reassurance. The couple in my row of three seats was maybe twenty-something, American. The young woman in the window seat had auburn hair smoothed back from a sweet face like something out of a Renaissance painting. Her partner leaned away from me in the middle seat, his large body turned toward her. I didn’t see his face. The short sleeves of his t-shirt showed muscular arms, very white skin. Somehow his position seemed tender rather than overpowering. I thought they might even be entwined. He’d given her an enormous bouquet which was stowed under the seat in front of him, pink roses and white and lavender flowers wrapped in gold and white tissue paper and transparent cellophane. It didn’t seem very practical for a four-and-a-half-hour flight, but it did seem romantic. She seemed to think so too. When the flight attendant commented on the flowers (“I hear someone has a birthday!”), the girl beamed. He must have taken the flight attendant aside to tell her, which also seemed romantic.
I scrolled through all the movies available, hoping for a good rom com or thriller, but couldn’t find anything that I liked, so I decided to finish a friend’s new short story collection. I wondered what my husband was reading. Immersed in the book, I didn’t pay much attention to the couple before I heard her saying “fuck” this and “fuck” that and “fuck you” in a loud whisper, drawing out the ffs and landing on the ks with great emphasis, and it dawned on me that they were fighting, and had been for some time. He was still turned away from me and leaning very close to her. They spoke in angry undertones. Mostly I could hear her and not him, but not the words, beyond her monotonous repetition of “I” and “relationship” and “fuck.” His tone seemed defensive. It went on and on. Imagine being stuck on an airplane in a conversation like that for four hours! And on your birthday, no less. Surely one or both of them wanted to escape the plane. I can’t remember ever having an argument with my husband that lasted four hours. I do remember peeling out of his driveway in a huff more than once when we were first dating—equating grand exits with passion, maybe. I can’t remember what we were arguing about. We never fight like that anymore. Did I enjoy the drama once? He always gives me flowers for my birthday, but he’d never give me flowers that would have to be thrown away after four hours in a plane, the sort of romantic gesture I wouldn’t appreciate at all. There’s a lot to be said for practicality and the quieter passion and comfort of a long marriage.
By the time we landed at SFO, a bumpy landing, the young woman was looking at the floor in silence, knees drawn up, her head wrapped in her arms. Her partner was still turned toward her. All I could see was his back. Eager to rejoin my husband and get home, I stood up, seeking his face in the crowded aisle, and didn’t look back at the unhappy couple in their seats. The flowers were dropping pink and white and lavender petals all over the floor in front of them.
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Jacqueline Doyle’s award-winning flash chapbook The Missing Girl is available from Black Lawrence Press. She has a hybrid essay collection, The Lunatics’ Ball, forthcoming from Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University Press in March 2027, and a fiction collection forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in September 2028. Her flash has recently appeared in Bending Genres, Ghost Parachute, Cleaver, Midway Journal, Lunch Ticket, and Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, and was shortlisted in the 2026 “Wigleaf Top 50.” She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Find her online at www.jacquelinedoyle.com.