This segment is titled “Free Fall.” It was actually one of the last segments I completed and I was getting tired of my first-person teenage boy perspective so I shifted the protagonist to a girl. This was done in part because of a recollection I read in one of the university literary magazines I used to read. The narrative was about a young woman who’d been repeatedly sexually molested and raped by her father. I read it by accident and found it repulsive and also couldn’t stop reading it. At the end, I cried so hard that I knew there was a deeper connection to her suffering than I was willing to superficially acknowledge. The part of the story about flying from the father’s house relates to a dream I had while flying from LAX to Oakland. In my dream, the fuselage of the plane ruptures and, in silence, the passengers begin to tumble into space. No one is screaming of gyrating wildly. In the middle of the dream, the plane I was in hit some turbulence and jolted me awake and the metaphorical relationships began to unwind in my thoughts. LINKED HERE is the story.
