The window beside you is cold where your temple has rested against it, and the plastic gives back a faint hum that belongs to the engines somewhere far behind. Below, the dark is not empty. A thread of orange runs across it, a highway laid down hours ago, its sodium lamps lit one after another by a county that has gone to bed. The thread bends, then breaks, then resumes. The cabin is dim. The reading light at your shoulder makes a small warm circle on the tray table and the cover of a closed book. Across the aisle, someone has pulled a blanket up to the chin. The air smells faintly of coffee and of the cool metal of the overhead bin.
You watch the highway thin to nothing and then nothing for a while, just black ground and the slow tilt of a wing. The wing light blinks once, red, and the prairie answers with one square of yellow far below, a farmhouse porch perhaps, or a kitchen left lit for someone coming home late. The light is alone for a long time. Then another joins it, then a scatter, a small town gathered around a grain elevator you cannot see but can imagine, tall and pale, holding up the night sky over a single street. The plane moves on and the town slides backward under the wing and is gone, and the dark closes again without seam.
The engine hum changes pitch by a quarter tone, a sound so soft you feel it more than hear it, the way you feel a refrigerator settle in a kitchen at the other end of a house. Up ahead, in the galley, a flight attendant tucks a tray into its slot with a small careful sound, metal against metal, and then there is the soft thud of the curtain being drawn. The cabin lights step down again, a notch you might have missed. Someone in the row behind shifts and the seat creaks. A man two rows up coughs once into his sleeve. The engines absorb these sounds the way a long river absorbs the noise of small stones dropped from a bridge.
You let your hand rest on the armrest, and the plastic there has the particular cool of a surface that has been touched by many palms and cooled again between them. The seatbelt across your lap is a flat weight, not tight. Under your shoes the floor carries a slow vibration that goes up into the bones of your ankles and stops there. The window glass when you touch it with one fingertip is colder still, and you can feel, faintly, the great rushing nothing on its other side, miles of air moving past at a speed that has nothing to do with you. You take your finger away. The print fogs and clears.
Far below, a river shows itself for a moment as a paler dark inside the dark, a long curve picked out by the last of a moon you cannot see from your seat. It bends across the prairie in three slow loops and then is hidden again by cloud, or by the simple fact of distance. A single light moves along a road beside it, headlamps perhaps, a pickup going home from somewhere to somewhere, and the light goes for a long time at the same pace as the plane before it finds its turning and is lost behind a low rise. The land down there is doing what it does at this hour, which is mostly nothing visible. A coyote crosses a fence line. A barn owl tips off a rafter. None of this reaches you. What reaches you is the dark, and the occasional yellow, and the sense of great flat distance held quietly underneath.
The air in the cabin smells of nothing much now, the coffee gone, only the dry warmth of the vents and the faint clean smell of the blanket folded on the empty seat beside you. You unfold it across your knees. The wool is thin and slightly scratchy and warms quickly. A page rustles somewhere up the aisle, someone still reading by their own small light, and then the page is turned and there is quiet again. The flight attendant passes once, slowly, checking, her footsteps soundless on the carpet, only the faint shift of fabric as she moves. She passes back the other way. The curtain at the galley settles.
Outside, the cloud thins and the prairie returns, and you can see now the long faint grid of section roads stretching to the horizon, each road a darker line on dark, recognizable only because they run so straight for so long. Every six miles or so, a single yard light marks a farmstead, blue-white, high on a pole, and these lights make a slow constellation that drifts beneath the wing as the plane crosses one township and the next. The grid does not hurry. It was laid down a long time ago by people walking with chains and stakes, and it has held its shape through every winter since. The lights blink as the wing crosses them, on, off, on, the rhythm of a thing being counted by something that is in no hurry to finish counting.
A town comes up larger this time, a real cluster, the streets visible as a faint warm web with the brighter spine of a main street running through it. You can almost make out where the grain elevators stand because of the dark patches around their bases, and where the water tower stands because of the small red light at its top, slowly pulsing. A train is moving through, or has just moved through, a line of low red lights stretched out for a mile along the tracks, going east while you go west, or perhaps standing still and waiting for a signal. The town slides under and away and the lights diminish behind the wing, and for a while you can still see the red pulse of the water tower, smaller and smaller, until the curve of the earth or a fold of cloud takes it.
Inside the cabin, the hum has steadied again, lower now, a long sustained note in a register just under hearing. The reading light at your shoulder is still on, the small warm circle still resting on the tray table, on the closed book, on the back of your hand when you lay it there. You reach up and turn the dial and the light dims by half, then by half again, and the circle softens until it is only a suggestion of warmth on the cover of the book. Your face in the dark window reflects faintly back at you, and beyond it the prairie continues to unscroll, dark, dark, a single yellow, dark, dark, the orange thread of another highway picked up and laid down again, the wing light blinking once, red, and once, red, and the engines holding their long low note under everything.
You shift in the seat and the blanket settles. The plane tilts very slightly, a long slow correction you feel in the small bones of your inner ear and nowhere else, and then it is level again. Somewhere ahead, hours ahead, there is a city that will come up as a wide gold stain on the horizon, and a runway that will rise to meet the wheels, but that is a long time from now and has nothing to do with this dark, with this window, with the yellow light that has just appeared and is being passed and is being left behind. The thread of orange returns for a mile and then is gone. The wing light blinks. The engines hold their note. Far down on the prairie, a porch lamp burns for someone who is not yet home, and the cloud moves slowly across it, and the light goes pale, and pale, and the dark closes over, soft as a hand laid on a page, and the plane moves on, and the next yellow is a long way off, and the hum settles further, and the small warm circle at your shoulder dims another notch, and the window cools against your temple, and the prairie keeps unrolling beneath, slow, slow, slower