Alix Ohlin - The Missing Person

It was my mother, also, who took me to the airport a few days later, after I’d said good-bye to Wylie and Irina. We drove past the pine trees along the university streets, the reflective windows of strip-mall stores, the freaks and fanatics on Central Avenue. In Brooklyn, I knew, the psychic was waiting, busy at work, the neon hands of her sign shaping a symbol meant to represent the future, but I was in love with Albuquerque then: the sun shone indiscriminately over the city, its kaleidoscope of color and noise and car exhaust and trash, the mix and din of the present day. As the nose of the plane lifted, shifting us all back in our seats, I watched the small, receding jewels of lawns and swimming pools and the vast brown wash of the mountains. The woman beside me opened the slick pages of a fashion magazine with an audible snap. We flew east, toward the green of the Midwest, our connecting flights and final destinations, and quickly, quickly, the desert disappeared.

Alix Ohlin was born in Montreal and studied at Harvard University and the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas. Her fiction has been selected for Best New American Voices 2004 and Best American Short Stories 2005 . She has received awards and fellowships from The Atlantic Monthly , the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. She lives in Easton, Pennsylvania, and teaches at Lafayette College.