Captain Picard lets
the dull roaring of the engines
settle into his
joints, his stomach, his lungs,
the smell of exhaust
makes him sleepy and calm.
He stirs his coffee
clockwise three times,
letting the last of
the bourbon dissolve before he takes a sip.
The plane hovers
above neatly identical farmlands,
only the sluggish
red-brown rivers of this planet snaking across the surface
break up the uniform
landscape.
Picard sips his
coffee, feeling it warm the back of his head,
fuzzy and soft, the
fingers of whiskey
soothe his throat on
the way down.
Finally his hands
relax and he rests one gently
on his lap, feeling
the not shaking of it.
He reads the letter
again, pausing to check the progress
of the flight path,
still more red-brown horizon,
still more rivers
cutting through neat rectangular fields.
The letter is
crumpled and stained,
a brief dismissal,
written in professional tones, relieving him of duty.
Effective
immediately.
That was six months
ago. Six months of a consultation job.
Six months on a
world of endless sunrises,
six months of
watching those damn suns hover on the horizon as they
danced a heavy
gravitational waltz with the planet,
six months of
telling closed faced, reluctant, farmers
with delicate
tattoos on their arms and necks how to
recycle their guns,
plow their land and water their crop of fruited vines
like they cared
whether or not the root systems would fail.
Six months of bones
that ached to dissolve and
reappear one more
time, maybe somewhere tropical,
with humid nights
full of calling insects
and a pyramid to
climb underneath the milky
exhalation of stars
above.
On this plane above
this dry place his skin is a prison;
like a healing scab,
something itching below the surface.
Picard sips his
coffee, licking the drops on the side of the cup
as he dreams of
endless blackness slipping past
the edge of the
windshield of his starship. He feels
the wind that wasn’t
really wind caress his face
and sees stars and
planets spinning off into nothingness
as he travels
forever and forever towards the edge of everything.
He closes his eyes
and as the chair cuts into
his lower back, and
the stewardesses walk by to pick up trash,
he turns up the
doo-wop song playing in his headphones and dreams
of the edge of
space, a thick line of light, like a flashlight underneath a door,
reaching up and over
a dark blue-black moon.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard Flies Commercial was written by Allison Emily Lee, who's work has appeared or is forthcoming from Severine, Lady, Bop Dead City, and Public Pool. Her first chapbook, Daphne Stories, is forthcoming from Bitterzoet Press. She is the founder and editor of Daphne Magazine. She lives in San Francisco and likes coffee, houseplants and swimming holes. You can visit her online at allisonemilylee.com
