Bodies In Flight
an excerpt

Dia de los Muertos. That’s what day it was. The second of November. Cold wind whipped around the streetcorners, beating dry leaves into fluffy flurries that smelled of sweet decay and coming holidays. October, Liza’s favorite month, was over. She had only waited this long, she supposed, to see it through.
She took the long route to the department building. She had supposed that everything would look more beautiful today, knowing she would never see it again. Instead, it looked hideous, cast in the dull orange glow of streetlamps. She felt a small soft thing flatten under the sole of her sneaker, and looked down to see a deformed Tootsie Roll, a stray remnant of Halloween cheer. Empty pumpkins leered from doorsteps and windowsills, their lights all gone out.
She passed under the threshold of the building as she always did, but this time, no one was there to greet her. It was too early in the morning for anyone to be at work. The elevator, however, was waiting for her. The familiar jaws groaned open and she stepped inside, pressing the little silver “7” on the button panel. A red light went on. She was going up. 2. She was sure she was alone. 3 Her heart began to race. 4. She began to fear she had forgotten something. 5. Left something unfinished. 6. But none of it mattered anymore, did it? 7. Of course not.
The door slid open.
She stepped out of the elevator into the long hall. She had always thought of the department as a quiet place. She’d been here after hours before, working late in Professor McElroy’s lab freshman year. Even the graduate students had gone to bed. Not Liza. She was becoming a creature of the night despite herself. Tonight – or was it last night? – she hadn’t slept at all. Oh, she’d wanted to. Anything was preferable to being conscious at this point. But she had forced herself, locked the door to her dorm room and thrown the key away, just in case the impulse to return to the idle safety of the covers should overtake her. She had forced her eyes open until they burned, the last cup of coffee nestled in her cupped hands, and she had walked.
She had always thought of the department as a quiet place. And it was. But today, she felt surrounded by sound: the hum of computers, the faint drone of the overhead lights, the hollow sounds of her footfalls filling the corridors. It might have been eerie. It wasn’t. It was comforting. She wouldn’t want to think she was missing out on the details. She wouldn’t want to believe that there was more to life than what she noticed each day as she went through the motions like a wind-up doll. Nobody could say that she hadn’t paid attention.
Behind any of these doors, someone could be working. What would she do if Professor Kearney stepped out from her office? Stutter and explain she had forgotten her notebook? She had to remind herself that getting caught had no consequences. The time for consequences was over.
The last key she had kept with her was the key to the laboratory. She turned the key, moved towards flicking on the lights, and changed her mind. The thin blue darkness was just fine.
She spotted a wad of orange Post-It notes on the desk next to the window. Meghan’s desk. It struck her that she should leave something for the grad student, a thank you to soften the blow. She rifled through the desk drawer for a pen. She hadn’t planned this part at all. It almost hurt, choosing the right words, thinking of the girl’s face torn with shock and sorrow.

Dear Meghan,
Thank you for the key, and for everything else. Good luck with your dissertation. Don’t let them name anything here after me. I think you’ll understand.
~ Liza

She set the lab key on the desk next to the note, and looked at it for a minute. Then, thinking it sounded stupid, she took the note and shredded it, stuffing the orange bits into her jean pockets. Of course Meghan wouldn’t understand. There were too many other people to thank, and the last thing she wanted to do was go out with a tearful, premeditated Oscar speech. No words were enough. If they needed words, they never understood in the first place.
The window squeaked as she pushed it open, and November air opened up wide in front of her. There was no point in looking down; she’d be there soon enough. Instead, she looked out at the skyline. The city silhouettes were lined in pink against the periwinkle pre-dawn glow. This was beautiful. She was going to join it, going to join the silence and the color. There wouldn’t be any more painful mornings; there was only this, one, beautiful morning, not yet born, for her to live. She could not think of any more apparent omen, or more merciful farewell.
Awkwardly – first one foot onto corrugated brick landing, a hand on black framed glass, elbows twisted, knees strained, the other foot firm – she forced her inflexible body out the window and perched like a gargoyle on the narrow overhang. She had no reason to be careful, or to wait – what was she waiting for? – but she did, for a minute, knees and calves beginning to tremble in their cramped squat.
And then, with peace on her forehead, she released the tension in her lower body and sprang like a dancer from the little ledge.
She had been imagining this moment for a long time. She had imagined that everything would look so much lovelier on the way down. But this was not skydiving. There was barely time to take in the bite of air resistance, the shock of verticality, very little time for fear or regret. But the minute her feet lost contact with the brick, she sensed something. Her eyes shot to the right.
There was a girl falling alongside her, another girl, whose feet had surrendered to the air at the same moment.
It was completely possible that she was hallucinating. Completely possible, were it not for the startling clarity with which that instant burned. She felt so thoroughly herself and so completely grounded in the sensations of these last two seconds. She had rarely felt more in control. Impossibly, in that single vertical moment, the image of the other girl’s face was emblazoned in Liza’s mind, photo-perfect: wide blue eyes, unreal black hair, a thin, unquestioning mouth. She looked directly at Liza just before the ground shattered into them.