Nike's Landing

how it feels to take a boeing 737 max from la guardia to o'hare

The lights in the sky used to be the same every night, but now they keep changing. This light was big and bright like a planet or an airplane, but it moved so much faster than a controlled airplane runway descent. Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean it emerged from the starvault into our atmosphere. Its path was downwards and westwards, and it left a trail of bright white fire behind it. It burnt past American airspace at supersonic speeds, spending just a few minutes over Long Island, then the gardens of New Jersey, then a little longer over the rolling hills of Pennsylvania and the progressively flatter fields of Ohio and Indiana and Illinois. As it descended closer to the ground, people in driveways and backyards across flyover country began to notice it. They pointed their smartphones at the light, but the small cameras couldn’t capture how it appeared to the naked eye. When its downward angle met the horizontal plane of the earth’s surface its path terminated, and the light wasn’t in the sky anymore.

She impacted in a cornfield. Crops in her landing zone were vaporized by the fire, and she laid in the ground in the muddy cratered middle. Her limbs were splayed out, left hand clutching her sword, and she was covered in dirt. Her fire was no longer burning but glowing white energy still emanated from her body,  Though she was laying on the ground and covered in dirt she unquestionably still carried quiet white nobility. In some ways the dirt was proof of the nobility. Her wings were white too, with a few feathers bent from the crash, but when she was ready she didn’t use them to pull herself up. She laid in the dirt for thirty seconds after the landing, then she pushed herself to a standing position with her right hand, the sword still in her left. From her standing position she surveyed the landscape into which she had dropped. Her eyes were drawn to a house a few hundred yards away, and she walked towards it. She gracefully stepped her slender body between the narrow rows of corn rather than cut down the plants with her sword. 

You and your family were seated in the living room of the house, watching the television. The satellite in your yard pulled down from space the green turf and colorful jerseys of Sunday Night Football. Your living room had a floor-to-ceiling sliding glass door that led out to the patio, where you’d laughed and grilled earlier that day while your team played. This game, in which none of you were much invested, had recently become a two touchdown margin in the fourth quarter, but none of you had taken the initiative to turn it off yet. Play stopped because of a defensive lineman injury so the game was relegated to a small corner of the screen while the network played a State Farm commercial. On the couch you all switched to your smaller personal screens. 

In unison, you turned your heads towards the glass door to look at the white light coming from outside. You saw her, and you didn’t move from the couch at all, because you weren’t sure what to do. You didn’t often have unannounced guests. She gently tapped her sword against the glass, and it shattered into tiny fragments that sparkled in her glow. The power went out as she stepped forward into the house, so the black of the night came in with her.