Planning
In the bathroom, fingering the wheel of tiny blue pills, you know that in a month he’ll be deployed and gone for eight more after that, but there is Dubai in August if the flights are cheap, the dripping heat and those white hotel sheets, and three months later if he comes home you might be in California, some desert town where they say the hospitals aren’t good and the air is bad for children, but if it isn’t California it will be Texas and either way the sun will be hot and red and the nights very cold, and you’ll be far from your parents who are aging, walking hesitantly now like toddlers, and either way you’ll have to sell the house by the ocean you came to love so much, the jets roaring in like lions from the front, and inside every cockpit, somebody’s beloved daughter or somebody’s beloved son coming back to life.