The Terminal, Submission 6 by Ryan Wrenn

The display illuminates green and Alexa flips open the phone. Tim will be here in two minutes.

Carmen Electra fills the screen selling some bubble gum, this one the ever-so-exotic mix of strawberry, banana, and something called ‘acai’. A berry only found in the jungles along the Amazon River, where Carmen now effortlessly paddles in a long, hollowed out tree trunk. Alexa wishes she had that smile.

Just then someone at the bus station switches the channel from some unseen location in the crowded terminal. The small television perched in the upper corner of the room blinks to black, then to some celebrity criminal she doesn’t yet recognize. She tries to follow the story as close she can but the buzz of fifty conversations swirling around her makes it harder than she expected to concentrate. She closes her eyes a moment to focus, to maybe isolate just once voice among the flat, blank hum.

She opens them again, finds herself staring across the area of crowded seats where she’s planted herself, near the door so she could see Tim’s car pull up. A man, nondescript but for an inordinately large pair of industrial gray headphones hanging loosely around a bone-thin neck, stands in the automated ticket line. His hair is flat and blond. His clothes also loose fitting, gray sweats. Her gaze would’ve passed right over him had his face not begun to scrunch up in some exasperated anguish of a yawn. How the creases around his eyes folded, how his nose looked pushed up above his mouth. The face exploded in her memory and for just that instant, almost imperceptible in her subconscious and entirely forgettable had his eyes not locked with hers when he finished. Jonah, from middle school. That day of the final presentation where he had paused and his face contorted in the same painful way. He collapsed and his muscles flexed, seized. How scared she was. How she never had to say anything to that boy, sitting next to her and staring as the teacher draped a small blanket over Jonah so as to better conceal his embarrassing convulsions, to know they were both terrified. How they kissed for the first time that afternoon. How she hadn’t spoken to him in six months.

Jonah evidently doesn’t recognize her and looks away as the line moves forward a step. She pulls her phone out again and thumbs through her contacts, finds his name. Looks out the window for Tim.