The Blue Frontier

A short story

Josh Withers | Unsplash

In the last seconds before the crash he thought, This is it, and then, Dad.

He had fought the spiral till the last minute, saw the trees coming up—at least it was trees and not bare mountainside—and knew that how the plane hit was out of his control. This was how it ended, for so many of them.

His father had never understood why he had to do it, why he needed those contraptions of steel and wire and the simultaneous romance and battle with the blue sky, instead of a horse on solid ground. He wouldn’t be angry, only bewildered, grief-hammered.

The pines were coming up, their top branches stretched out like the arms of ships’ masts spread for birds to light on, rotating dizzily as they swooped up toward the plunging nose of the Douglas. And then suddenly it was very quiet, and something strange-looking was coming slowly into focus before his eyes. He realized it was the jagged broken glass of the curved windscreen, with a mass of pine branches outside it and some sharp broken ends thrust through the hole in the glass.