Here is an excerpt from BLUE (unpublished work-in-progress):
✵✵✵
Lizzie Jordan was six years old when she realized the sky did not make noises.
It was embarrassing, really.
Tommy Rutgers, who was obsessed with all things
mechanical, made this offhand comment as he glanced into the blue Boston
sky...
“That’s a Boeing 737 MAX with LEAP turbofans.”
Lizzie frowned. “What are
you talking about?”
“The jet! Didn’t you hear it? Maybe it’s going to Florida.
My grandmother lives in Florida. In an old-folks’ home.”
Lizzie looked up, up in
the sky, and felt her heart flutter with confusion. A jet? She saw the plumes of
white, clouds and fluff, lines and ripples, and she had one of those paralyzing
moments of truth. The kind that changed your life forever. The kind that changed
the way you looked at the world, the way you believed the world to be.
The sky
did not make noises.
The sounds that made up the background of her day—along
with the screech of the T on metal tracks, Mrs. Salter screaming at her
children, faded notes of a violin from Apartment 2C, and sometimes, faintly,
muffled sobs from her mother hidden in the bathroom—those sounds included Boeing
737 jets with turbofans.
Lizzie shielded her eyes and peered into the sky,
wondering how she could have been so wrong. It never occurred to her that the
dull roar, waxing and waning, was man-made and not natural.
It had just seemed
to be the way of the world.
Blue sky, white fluff, dull roar. From the sun? A
streaky atmosphere? Beyond the moon? Mixed in with the wind that spiraled around
her street, tossing discarded tickets and dirt, and created a sort of whizzing
sound. She just assumed...
It was all the same. Tossed together, sky and wind
and sound that was a comfort.
But she was wrong. It wasn’t natural at all. It
emanated from a 100,000-pound hunk of metal and steel, a miracle of engineering.
A man-made miracle.
She could feel her face heat. The blush crawled up her neck
in splotches and stained her cheeks. Tommy wasn’t paying her the slightest bit
of attention. Only she was aware of her shameful and embarrassing mistake.
Nothing was ever quite the same again, after that illuminating moment of time.
Lizzie never took anything for granted. She poked and prodded the things that
people offered to her. Information. Promises. She tried to peel back the layers
and find out the truth. In her own little way, as a six-year old girl.
Six years
later, when her mother calmly announced, “Your father and I are getting a
divorce and you’re moving in with Granny,” she’d gotten that same sensation.
A
shock to the system. A flutter in her chest.
A pain in her belly that wouldn’t
go away, not even after antacids and chamomile tea.
Life was divided into before
and after.
Before, when the sky was blue, dotted with swirly clouds and white
lines and made noises.
After, when a jet puked exhaust into the atmosphere and
roared its way to Florida.
Before, when you and Mommy and Daddy were a happy
family living in an apartment over Tarantino’s Market in the North End of
Boston. After, when Daddy moved out to live with his graduate student and Mommy
had a nervous breakdown.
After, when you left everything you knew—the symphony
of the city, packed with sights and sounds like clickity-clacks and smoked meats
and mocking laughter—and ventured into the forest of Maine, totally and
completely unprepared for that next adventure.
Nothing could have prepared her
for that adventure.
Nothing.
© 2025 by Penny Watson
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