Episode 6: The Red-Eye Flight

David presses his forehead against the oval window. Below, nothing but darkness and occasional flickers that might be ships or might be stars reflected in water. The cabin lights are dimmed to simulate sleep, but nobody is sleeping. In his jacket pocket: his father's watch. Still ticking. Still set to Oslo time, where three hours ago he stood beside a hospital bed and held a hand that had held his when he learned to walk.

The flight attendant moves through the aisle like a ghost, offering water to shadows.

David checks his phone: 2:23 AM in the airplane's manufactured reality. 8:23 AM in Norway, where his father's body is growing cold. 8:23 PM yesterday in Seattle, where his wife and daughters are eating dinner without him, not yet knowing he's coming home a different person than the one who left.

He exists in all three times and none of them. Suspended. Transitional. A man between versions of himself.

The window shows his reflection more clearly than the darkness outside. He looks for his father in his own face and finds him everywhere—the line of the jaw, the way worry settles around the eyes.

I look like him now, David thinks. Now that he's gone, I finally look like him.

"First time flying orphaned?"

David turns. The woman wasn't there during boarding. He's certain of it.

She's maybe sixty, wearing a flight attendant's uniform from an airline that doesn't exist anymore—he can tell by the vintage cut, the colors slightly wrong.

"Excuse me?"

"Your first flight after losing a parent," she clarifies, her name tag reading Katherine - Between-Worlds Service. "You have that look. Like you're trying to figure out which time zone your heart lives in now."

David finds himself talking. About the hospital room. About how his father's last words were in Norwegian, a language he'd left behind fifty years ago, returning to him at the end like a tide coming in.

"He called me by his brother's name," David says. "His brother who died in childhood. For a moment, I think he thought I was the one who'd been waiting for him all these years."

"Maybe you were," Katherine says. "In that moment, maybe you were everyone who'd ever loved him, all at once."

She offers him something from her cart—not peanuts or pretzels, but a small glass of liquid that glows faintly amber in the dim cabin light.

"What is it?"

"Time zone neutralizer. Helps with the transition."

He drinks it. It tastes like his father's cologne and his childhood kitchen and things he'd forgotten he remembered. David looks around the cabin with new clarity. Other passengers sit in strange stillness, all awake despite the hour. Across the aisle, a woman clutches a small urn wrapped in a blanket. Her eyes are dry but ancient.

Three rows up, a young man in a wrinkled suit stares at his phone—a text thread with someone named "Dad" that will never update again. Behind him, an elderly woman whispers prayers in a language he doesn't recognize, rosary beads clicking like a clock measuring grief.

"We're all on the same flight," Katherine observes. "This is the red-eye for the newly unmoorеd. The route between who you were when someone needed you to be their child, and who you become when nobody holds that role for you anymore."

"Where are we really?" David asks.

Katherine gestures to the window. "Look closer."

He does. The darkness outside isn't empty anymore. In it, he sees fragments—memory or hallucination or something in between. His father teaching him to tie a tie. His father at his wedding, crying quietly in the front row. His father meeting his granddaughters for the first time, holding them with hands that had built houses and fixed cars and folded David's tiny clothes when he was too small to remember.

"This flight path," Katherine explains, "goes through all the places parenthood lives. We fly through memory, through grief, through the strange empty space where your father's voice used to be."

"How long is the flight?"

"As long as you need. Time works differently up here."

David pulls out his father's watch. The second hand sweeps around the face with stubborn persistence. His father had worn it for forty years, through every important moment and every mundane Tuesday.

"He gave it to me the last day," David says. "Said, 'Your time now.' I thought he meant the watch."

"Didn't he?" Katherine asks.

"He meant... everything. The time to be the oldest. The one who remembers. The one who tells the stories about who we were."

The watch is warm in his palm. Still keeping Oslo time. Still measuring hours his father will never see.

"You can change it," Katherine says gently. "Set it to Seattle time. Move forward."

"Not yet," David whispers. "I'm not ready yet."

"That's why this flight exists. To be not ready safely. To sit in the space between his time and yours."

The woman with the urn catches his eye. "My mother," she mouths. "I'm bringing her home."

The young man in the suit turns around. "My father had a heart attack during my presentation. I was talking about quarterly earnings when he died."

"My husband," the elderly woman says, rosary still clicking. "Sixty-three years. I don't know how to be a person instead of a pair."

They all sit in their separate griefs that are somehow the same grief. Loss has its own language, spoken fluently at 35,000 feet.

"What do we do now?" David asks Katherine.

"You sit. You fly. You let the distance carry you toward the next version of your life." She stands, smoothing her vintage uniform. "And when you're ready, you land."

"What if I'm not ready when we land?"

Katherine smiles sadly. "Eventually, everyone lands."

She wheels her cart toward the next row, then pauses. "Your daughters are waiting for you, you know. Not the old you. The new you. The one who understands loss. The one who can teach them what your father taught you."

David feels something crack open in his chest. "I don't know what he taught me."

"Yes, you do. You knew it the moment you held his hand and didn't let go. You knew it when you called your daughter to tell her you loved her before the phone call about grandfather. You knew it when you put on his watch."

She leans closer. "He taught you that love doesn't end when the heart stops. It just changes time zones."

The pilot's voice crackles through the intercom: "Beginning our descent into Seattle. Local time is 7:17 PM. Please return your seats to their upright position."

David blinks. Hours have passed. Or minutes. Or a lifetime.

The cabin lights brighten gradually, simulating sunrise even though outside it's evening. The other passengers stir—the woman cradling her urn, the young man closing his grief-scrolling phone, the elderly widow tucking away her rosary.

They're all moving forward. The flight is landing.

David looks at his father's watch. Still showing Oslo time. Still ticking stubbornly forward.

He carefully turns the crown, setting it back seven hours. Watching the hands spin backward in order to move forward. 7:19 PM in Seattle. Now.

David stands at the carousel, watching luggage circle like thoughts that won't settle. His small carry-on contains only grief and his father's watch and the person he's becoming.

Through the arrivals gate, he sees them—his wife, his daughters, holding a sign that says "Welcome Home." They don't know yet that a different person is returning. Someone who understands that everyone's parents die, that everyone eventually becomes the oldest generation, that love is a watch that keeps ticking even when the wrist that wore it has gone still.

Later. Home.

David sits at the kitchen table while his daughters show him drawings they made while he was gone. His wife makes tea, gives him space to be quiet, to be present and absent at the same time.

On his wrist, his father's watch keeps Seattle time now. But sometimes, in quiet moments, he swears he hears it ticking in Oslo rhythm—a subtle double-time, like two hearts beating in one body. His time and his father's time, overlapping.

The watch is heavy with memory and light with permission to keep living.

Outside, planes cross the night sky—red-eye flights carrying people between versions of themselves, suspended in the liminal space where grief becomes something you can live with.

David kisses his daughter's forehead and feels his father in the gesture.

Some flights never really end. They just land you somewhere you can finally begin again.

// END EPISODE 6

A peak behind the scenes at the first draft for the chapter image: