WATCH ME FLY
ALM No.94, October 2026
SHORT STORIES
The artist touched down in Miami early on a September Sunday. In two days, his exhibit would debut to a thirsty public, and he needed at least that much time to memorize the names of those cartoonish collectors, summon confidence to suffer through their small talk, and submit to the tacky, art deco swank. Far from home, the artist missed the city’s relentless noise and hustle, craved the daily routine of elbowing through the revolving door of his office building, saluting Chester at the front desk, then ascending to the cozy calm of his 92nd floor studio.
Still, buyers would beget buyers and his agent had assured him that New York was the past, Miami is the future. Leave the ‘90s behind, plunge forth toward the aughts! He rolled up his short sleeves to a tank top formation, flipped his sunglasses’ lenses in front of his squinting brown eyes and hopped off the airstair onto the tarmac. Arms at his side, the artist mimicked an airman in freefall, those angelic, tragic symbols of capture and release who so inspired his sculpting, and would fuel a skyward-bound surge of the artist’s reputation and financial future.
“Ah-ah ah ah ah ah ah!,” Robin shrieked, cranking the radio dial. Classical music was his latest whim, sating the unrelenting hunger to snag pleasure from the arts when the rest of his life suffocated him with burdensome expectations. “Tod und Verzweiflung flammet um mich her!”
Personal problems aside, Robin vowed to make progress elsewhere. The new job would get him on sturdier footing - health insurance, a 401k match -, the broadening cultural tastes - classical music now, next: fine art at the galleries? - would serve the dual aspirations of boosting his ego and social stature in tandem. But first: the car swap.
Robin had bought both cars, so why not lay claim to what’s his? Not like he wasn’t generously providing Maddie with a practical - not to mention, a more car-pool friendly - vehicle. A midnight arrival at the family house he no longer called home necessitated a hushed, stealth transaction, so Robin parked next to Maddie’s car, opening that door while closing hers, to align the sounds. Twenty years after promising Maddie a Mercedes, she still drove the same used sedan he sprung for a decade ago, fulfilling a pledge which only seemed to satisfy Robin.
“Don’t do it just to add inches to your dick,” Maddie had told him. Ha ha.
Robin eked out of the driveway, clenching his jaw to mime the effect of tiptoeing through the front door after a long, unexplained absence. The risk of waking Maddie and the kids diminished after the car dipped out, and Robin switched from R to D, this weathered green (“Color of money!”) machine wheezing through the neighborhood and onto the highway. Even the radio sounded more pure, the imported system eschewing static and effecting a clear, cogent rendering of the FM waves. Robin hummed along with the Mozart melody, racing away from his former home. Stripped of glory, he vowed to return a cultivated, evolved breadwinner, the victor and still champion, a soaring, floral version of his current self.
“Wait. Family? What is Michael Mann doing in our driveway?” Ingrid, the eldest child, an overachiever who had inherited her father’s high I.Q. but improved on his juvenile impulsivity, summoned her mother from downstairs.
“Ha ha ha ha,” Maddie stomped down each step, negotiating her daughter’s tone.
“Kid you not,” Ingrid pointed outside. “Suzanne Somers is gone.”
“Can I drive to school?” asked Ollie. The youngest, often clueless and always cute, aged sixteen going on twelve, Ollie was coddled by mother and sister alike.
“No,” Maddie said, gathering her good senses and dispatching rage. “Ingrid, grab the lunches. Did you make Ollie’s sandwiches yet?”
“Affirmative, mother figure,” Ingrid stuffed the brown bag into his backpack. “But on the matter of driving, that’ll be a no, youngest dependent. Not safe for the collective, given that wobbly, wood-sided liability parked out front.”
“No, smart ass,” Maddie swung the front door open, motioning for her children to lead. “It’s because he’s underaged, okay? I’ll drive you and your brother to school, because, reminder - I have a place to be, and that place is called work where I get paid something called money. Okay? And that’s what pays for the sandwiches, and the gas for this humongous station wagon that apparently will get us there. Ollie, hon, haul ass.”
Robin had taken credit for naming the cars, when really, Maddie was responsible. Mann and Somers, Somers and Mann. Timeless legends, both! Early in the 1990s, Maddie was nursing nostalgia for that previous decade. Choosing two models of peak ‘80s style would, for her, provide a link back to that simpler era, when she could value herself as an individual rather than a vessel for breastfeeding, cooking, and scheduling.
When Robin’s dad died, Maddie felt the swell of Robin’s pent-up grief bowl them all over, and she rushed to steady the unit. Then, Robin lost his job - the March 2000 Nasdaq crash eviscerated his job prospects and their savings - and the spiral accelerated. He would disappear for days, returning some nights to “borrow” money - from Ingrid and the kids - then drive away before dinner, probably sleeping in the car or on a friend’s couch. The last straw was when Robin, having distanced himself from parental responsibilities, showed up late to a couples’ therapy session, reeking of cigar smoke and entitlement. He mocked the therapist’s accent (“Say water again. There it is, the Jersey drawl. Born and bred, trash like me!”) and the next day, Maddie made Robin sign a letter committing to a formal divorce - when they could each afford a lawyer -, and that although he had to leave the home, he would have unlimited visiting privileges, for the kids’ sake.
Still, Robin retreated further. He didn’t know how to be a freelancer. It wasn’t like it used to be, when he could come home from work and be the carefree cool dad, tutor Ingrid with her math homework, and advise Ollie on his throwing motion. Those years, Maddie and Robin were an unbreakable team, and now, Robin rationalized forcing himself into isolation so he wouldn’t infect Ingrid and Ollie with the stench of failure. Hitting his mid-40s with a thud, Robin felt like he’d leapt out of an airplane at twenty-thousand feet, and now, he was suspended in the air, the parachute gliding him towards a patch of abandoned farmland far from home.
But, the recent weeks had been kind to him, and after cold-calling some old colleagues and knocking on the door of a new (now former) neighbor, Robin had secured several interviews and earned two job offers. When one of the offers was revoked due to his inflexible salary demands - a salary advance and bonus guarantee for at least two years - Robin sprung to accept Plan B.
It was time to re-engage. Ingrid had written a letter to Robin, chastising his priorities and “waning interest in bare-bones accountability.” In response, he showed up to her school, found her classroom, and walked past the door pretending he was on a downward escalator, impersonating that Austin Powers’ bit Ingrid always enjoyed. At Ollie’s baseball games, Robin sat on the grass behind the outfield fence: far from the bleachers and parent cliques, closer to Ollie in leftfield. No longer a ghost, Robin was embracing the role of a jester, still not quite a father, but a measurable upgrade. The job hadn’t so much awakened him as flipped on a switch, and the effort he’d devoted to finding employment could now be redirected back at his family. True, it wouldn’t happen overnight, but Robin had the newfound vitality to methodically execute his return, like a maestro guiding an orchestra from a lull in the action to an epic, unifying climax.
On Monday morning, Robin woke up in the train station parking lot, nestling against the chilly leather of Suzanne Somers. The alternative was sleeping at his mom’s apartment, where he’d been spending a bulk of the nights since the split. It was temporary, free, and a reasonable plan given its proximity to his office in the city. Growing up there, the town was a lower-middle-class enclave and now, young families and recent graduates flooded the streets, drawn to the low relative cost of living and city views.
Robin couldn’t stomach the nights there for that reason - youth and hope, blah blah - so he would spend the occasional night in his car, having packed clothes for the work day ahead. At least he didn’t stand a chance of running into his dad, who lived in town - estranged from his ex-wife and all family - until he died, spending most days during his twilight years recovering from the night before, seated at a bus stop bench, shouting at birds and cars. At least, that’s what he was doing the last few times Robin saw him. Only once did Robin get out of the car. Driving back from Ollie’s game, Robin parked the car across the street, and walked towards his dad, who stared straight ahead, unflinching. Robin stood for a minute then turned around, and didn’t speak a word to Ollie for the drive home.
“Money and pain, money and pain,” Robin mumbled, settling into an empty three-seater on the early train, pressing nose near the window, trying to sneak a peek at the colossal city skyscrapers. His future, a future was achievable, and improvement beckoned.
“Well, suck my fart,” Maddie groaned, mixing disdain, self-pity and a hint of smirking laughter which might greet the moment years removed from the insufferable now. Michael Mann was no longer in the spot where she had parked it that morning.
Rather than return to the receptionist’s desk at her rinky-dink suburban dental office, Maddie walked through the lot, picking up the pace once she resolved to walk home. She took out her phone, dangling her fingers over 9-1-1, but instead flipped it shut. It was a two-mile walk, and if she took a short-cut, it would cut the trip in half.
Waiting for the nearest light to turn red, Maddie bent down into a sprinter’s pose, then shot herself out of a cannon, attacking the traffic-less highway and hurdling over the divider. Maddie regained her balance and kept running, through the strip mall on the other side and into the woods behind the Radioshack.
Maddie slowed down to catch her breath, and began to glide. She extended an arm out, closed her eyes and tilted her head up, and whipped her body in a 360 motion, imagining the life of an unmarried woman. She’d get a studio apartment in the city - any neighborhood would do - find some job similar to what she has now, run in the park every morning and read a book at a crowded bar on weekends. Twirling down the path out of the woods, Maddie grinned with a naughty intent, daydreaming about her 20s, pre-family. Meeting her sister in the East Village after night classes, signing karaoke, drinking too much sake and vomiting in the same stall where she’d eventually fuck Robin on their first date. Too soon after that, she got pregnant and dropped out of night school.
Back in reality, it was no longer possible to savor the walk and bittersweet memories, for as Maddie approached the house, she saw Suzanne Somers parked out front. Parallel to the curb, a pair of stout human legs hung out the driver’s side window. Moving closer, she heard the faint sounds of somber strings, and the much more insufferably sad tune of Robin snoring.
Poolside, the artist watched the South Beach sun set. A full day of interviews and kissing the prospective buyers’ collective asses earned him this downtime. Restless still, he hate-sipped a cucumber water and called his office. The number, of course, rerouted to the front desk.
“I said now wait a minute, Chester,” the artist sang into the other line.
“And how is the artistic enfant terrible mixing in with the other half?” Chester cackled, sounding like how home cooking tastes.
“I miss the sirens. Reer, reer reer! The coffee-cart coffee. I wish I could stand over a subway grate like Marilyn,” the artist mocked his voice catching. “Listen, Chisel. I’m out of ammo. Can you run upstairs and take a picture of my Strangelove sculpture? Overnight that to me? If I have to answer, ‘what are you working on’ once more, I will self-immolate.”
“Friends like you, bro,” Chester said.
“I know. I’ll buy you a street dog when I return,” the artist said. “Or, I’ll get you a job. Oh wait, I already did that. Hmm, how else to repay an uncommon man for a common favor?”
“You can share some ego, since you got plenty of that to burn!”
“Ha ha he he ha ha ho,” the artist said. “I joke because I love, I love because you’re the type of guy who will do a solid for a sun-soaked man of the world, whose chocolate skin is battling back against the bright rays, and losing. Talk back at you nice and early.”
“Wake up,” Maddie tapped on the back window with the flip flop she took off Robin’s foot.
“Sunshine,” Robin squirmed upright, reflexively turning the radio up. Maddie walked across the front lawn, picking up her pace once she heard the car door slam shut behind her. “Hey, kid. Hey, Madison County. C’mon, look. Listen. Watch.”
Robin backpedaled to the car and caught the whispers of Swan Lake on the radio. Drugged into submission to Tchaikovsky, he arched his back against Suzanne Somers, flailing his arms to the tune of the crescendo. Maddie had already scampered inside and come back out, tucking an untidy assortment of memories under each arm.
“Started a new job recently, lady,” Robin floated towards her, extending his arms out, then whirling back, like a directionless plane. “Marching back up the stairs to the pearly gates of high finance. So, watch me fly.”
Maddie offloaded what she’d retrieved from the house, one by one. That family portrait where no one smiled except Robin, the theater tickets she’d saved over the years, the plastic bag containing both Ollie’s and Ingrid’s first lost teeth. The wings the stewardess had given them on the honeymoon flight when they were upgraded to first class for free.
Heading back across the lawn, Maddie looked around to see if any neighbors were out. Scanning back and to the side, she was relieved, but then saw Michael Mann crawling past, Ingrid glancing at Robin’s whirling routine, his music drowning out the sound from the Oldsmobile engine. Ollie sat in the front seat, stunned, or maybe just ashamed. He shook his head and flipped his hand forward, to signal go, flee this circus! Ingrid followed younger brother’s direction, gently tapping the gas to not draw attention to the exit.
“This is some amateur marriage unraveling,” Maddie told him, feeling freer now that the kids had driven away. “We’ve done better. Much worse. You: cutting the landline when I was talking to my sister. Me: tossing a coaster at your forehead. You: waiving a butter knife, threatening to ‘brand me’ in sympathy.”
“Memories!” Robin cooed. “Ah, quite a pile you’ve gifted me there, I take it these are the assets you’re willing to part with. If this is a settlement offer: I accept!”
“I’m dying to know what it’s like, Robbie,” Maddie moved closer to him. “To have cornered the mid-life crisis market? High time you share some of the oxygen you’ve guzzled up from our family. My turn! Let me fuck up, freak out. Steal a car. Ditch the kids to imitate your own shitty, invisible father.” She poked a thumb and her chest then a firm pointer finger just below his neck.
“Ref, ref, throw the flag!” Robin said, turning back like an actor playing a soldier wounded in battle. “Toss in the towel. I’ve had my fill.”
“Congrats to you,” Maddie clapped at him. “For claiming what’s yours. Take the car, just stay away. Let us go from your vortex. No more. No more you.”
“Fly for me, Mad. Make like a swan and die for me. I’d do it for you. Die for me.” He power-walked past Maddie and locked the front door behind him. She started to pound but relented when she saw a young mom with a stroller pushing past the house.
Inside, Robin navigated the kitchen like a man possessed. Taking the clean plates from the dishwasher, sliding them back to their rightful pantry positioning. A towel over his shoulder, he dabbed all the utensils free from splotches, no water droplets that would linger and compromise their shine. It was never Maddie’s thing, the dishwasher, she’d do the cooking and he’d take care of the cleaning. The dishwasher was the first purchase they made in their new home, and that was the only chore he maintained until the day he moved out. Robin would forget Ingrid’s birthday and Ollie’s middle name, but he’d never ignore the dishes.
“Plates first,” Robin narrated this feverish mission. “And, the grand finale. Last, never least, thy sharps!” Robin pocketed a butter knife, a petty robbery that Maddie wouldn’t notice.
It’d be a secret with himself, and he’d set that on his desk at work in the morning. A memento, marking his eventual return home. The next day would be just that, a new start, the latest in his forge forward. And when he passed Maddie, Robin whispered the final chords of Swan Lake, and twirled one last time on the front lawn, before climbing into Suzanne Somers and driving away from the old version of himself. Dispatching that unsavory character, Robin would return a fortress of stability, redefining what it means to dote on one’s dearests.
“Master, commander” Chester picked up the phone, anticipating the artist’s 8 a.m. Tuesday call. “Is this my captain speaking?”
“First name fed, last name ex speaking. We’ve intercepted some obscene material and will be interrogating the responsible party.”
“Cagey,” Chester winked at the brokers rumbling into the lobby. “Of course, the photo is in transit. Now just don’t forget your ol’ pal back here when you’re flying so high above the clouds, high-fiving the stars, sucking the Milky Way’s supplicant teets.”
“Only place I want to be flying is back home,” the artist brooded, anticipating Chester’s silence in lieu of sympathy. “This room. You wouldn’t believe it. An interior designer binged Scarface and chased it with a super-sized dollop of Miami Vice. I hope my work ages more gracefully than this tired aesthetic.”
“Bro, I’m no art critic,” Chester thumbs-upped at some familiar faces, including that new guy who could never remember his I.D. badge or Chester’s name. “But, sure you don’t want to quit your day job?”
“Ignorance is the highest form of flattery, Cheswick. Now: is my object of creative fervor intact?”
“Yes, all your fake pilots and martyrs are thriving,” Chester rolled his eyes. “Some trippy, artistic bullshit you’re creating up there on ninety-two.”
“They’re not fake! These are real objects. Or, at least I’m giving them life.”
“And what do these heroic objects stand for?”
“Exactly that - heroism! And cowardice. Freedom! And oppression. Capture! And release.”
“I don’t know how you work up there, so far from the ground, the city must sound like a bird chirping. Minions below, no wonder you feel so large and most in charge.”
“Thank you for accepting this collect call,” the artist said. “Your bill will be in the mail. See you when I’m freed from the captivity of these vultures.”
Robin hustled through the revolving door, striding to catch up with a junior salesperson arriving ahead of him. Passing the front desk he eavesdropped on the lobby attendant whose name he’d never remember, despite the name tag and common ground that they started new jobs on the same day. It sounded like a personal call, the burly man playfully ribbing the voice on the other end.
“Bullshit artist,” Robin heard. Was that it, though? No. It was something related to art, some chatter about the 92nd floor. Paintings, sketches, sculptures? Robin was dizzy, practically foaming at the mouth, an unwavering curiosity multiplying with each step towards the elevator shaft. Late already, Robin redirected his tunnel vision, and detoured away from the white-shoe lemmings, all headed up to 102.
“Sayonara, philistines!” Robin giggled, and dipped off at 92, while his wandering mind went into overdrive. The fine arts, of course! A logical next step in his personal transformation. The possibilities yielded to probabilities to certainties: this would become his community, a secret society of artists accepting him - a neighbor who worked just ten floors up -, into their stead. A steward of finance with a love - Need! - for art. Come on in, Ingrid and Ollie! See what your old man’s been up to, making a living and living, all while burrowed inside this capitalist haven, the center of world trade!
“Bingo,” Robin toured the vacant space, suspecting that it had to be the detritus of some dot-com failure. But here, the empty reception desk and naked floors had turned into storage space for the sketches and sculptures in varying degrees of completion, scattered around the cavernous floor. Robin hadn’t been in an art gallery since moving to the suburbs a decade earlier, and yet, he complied with some internal rulebook, to look and not touch.
Facing the window in the corner of the room, a familiar figure demanded Robin’s attention. He’d seen it before, only on a TV screen. The casing of an athletic, adult male body saddled over a girthy, phallic structure. Here, it resembled a slender dude on a barrel, but in Robin’s memory, it was that cowboy caricature Slim Pickens on top of the atomic bomb, riding it while hollering and swinging his hat in the air. Robin moved towards the sculpture, touching the veiny arm of the figure, who had the outline of a much more robust and hale creature than the presumed source material.
Then, the first plane connected. It catapulted into the South Tower, and Robin’s eyes pinched trying to make sense of what happened outside this confined world. Shattered glass exploded outward and inside, sending Robin to the floor in a violent whoosh. He came to, and kept low to the ground for self-preservation, guided by the panic traveling over from the South Tower. The sirens, whistles and screams raised the stakes - This is it! The big one! -, and Robin crawled on his bloody forearms towards the Strangelove sculpture.
Reaching for it, Robin was thankful to be alive, the most accessible emotion perhaps a hopeless optimism countering the inevitable rush that he was able to die. The next plane hurled square into the side of the North Tower, and the heat from the outside felt like it was beneath him, overwhelming all senses, blurring his vision. Robin willed himself to live, assuming he’d melt if he didn’t move, and he pounded his legs to confirm he was still capable of touch.
When the last 787 torpedoed what remained of the Towers, Ingrid and Ollie finally returned home. Maddie sat on the front steps, hungover from that fight, all 42 of her years contributing to a slouch in her posture and overall disposition, a crease across her mouth reshaped into a disingenuous smile. She hugged her kids, guilty of wishing that they’d drive back away - not forever, no, just for another night - allotting her room to consider what her life would look like without any of them. Happier, maybe, but not happy. Worse, not better.
“Tell me something, children,” Maddie squeezed each small arm closer. “Have the adults dropped the ball? Did we lay an egg? Is the milk spoiled forever?”
“You’ll figure it out,” Ollie answered. “Or maybe you won’t. We’ll be fine though, we’re young.”
“Tell me another thing,” Maddie lowered her head to her daughter’s shoulder.
“That car drives like shit,” Ingrid covered her mouth, feigning regret at the profanity.
Maddie linked their arms together and marched back inside the house, leading them away from the site of her marriage’s final dysfunction toward their own embarrassing melodrama and destructive chaos. The dreams and nightmares, power ballads and staccatos, the rupture and repair, the rebound and rejection, incessant fuck up after fuck up and right back to the start.
The South Tower collapsed in a fiery blaze, while the artist held court in the hotel bar. He’d mastered the shtick, exuding effortless charm while glaring at the name tags of these patrons who pursued some elusive sense of value, deploying the artist as their muse. Soon, he’d go home, leaving his only surviving work to languish in the buyers’ garish homes. The rest of his life’s work, all in the studio, wouldn’t breathe again. Futures deleted, potential seized. Unprepared to start over, the artist would have no choice but to reverse in order to advance, a cocksure yet aimless pilot navigating a turbulent aircraft, ruddering in neutral before surging towards the next phase of his life and career, both defined by the event which could only exist in the form of a waking nightmare, saddling his imagination in perpetuity.
Oxygen waning, energy depleted, Robin hooked an arm around the model’s torso, clawing his way onto the back of the sculpture to hug the waist of the strapping male figure who was riding the barrel like it was a thoroughbred. The ground shook, then an inexplicable force - otherworldly in its sheer power - ejected Robin and the sculpture outside into the suffocating smog, that thick, death-devouring air.
The North Tower descended on itself, its disappearing middle erasing the charring bodies trapped too high up to jump. Chester at this point had escaped, and was facing the Hudson River, caked in ash and hacking up the smoke that would squat permanently in his lungs, a reminder of the day when he lost a job and barely dodged death. Power-walking up the West Side Highway, Chester patted down his suit, filthy with soot, holding the picture he promised to send to the artist up to the sky, measuring it against the apocalyptic vision that was floating away from him. An optical illusion, or maybe, stress-induced hallucination, Chester saw two lifeless objects jockeying the artist’s Strangelove model and then out of sight, leaving him with the only remaining evidence that it ever existed at all.
Robin’s head bobbed forward, then to the side, and he prepared for a final gasp, summoning all of his diminished faculties to utter triumphant words of redemption and closure.
Watch me fly.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Dedicated to:
Bob Parks (1954-2001)
&
Michael Richards (1963-2001)
Kevin Parks writes short fiction, essays and movie reviews. His work has been published in After the Art, Arteidolia, Drunk Monkeys, The Movie Buff and Tulsa Review. Kevin lives in New York with his partner, their daughter and dog. He watches many movies and does not own a pair of jeans.
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