She awoke upside down. It was dark . . . everything was upside down. Her father and mother, in the pilot’s seat and the passenger’s, respectively, hung from their seats, their arms scattered below in disarray with the exception of her father’s left hand that was still clutching the butterfly shaped rudder control.

“Daddy?” she said softly. There was no answer so she repeated herself, louder, “Daddy!” Still no answer, she reached out and nudged his head. Her father’s head swung loosely and he made no sound. Her mother appeared just as unresponsive, her head was turned slightly toward her and she could see her mother’s eyes, the lids open and the pupils slightly rolled up (down); it was very strange.

Her sister and her cousin were in the passenger cabin with her, seat-belted as she was, they hung from their seats and when she prodded turned out to be as limp as her father. Blood was dripping from her cousin’s fingers to splatter into a small pool that had formed on the ceiling, now the floor, of the airplane.

“Wake up! Somebody wake up!” she screamed several times. She was beginning to get a little angry. Why won’t they wake up?

Then she thought of something her mother told her not so long ago. They were in the kitchen baking cherry pies. The flour sifter was jammed and wouldn’t work. “Problems don’t solve themselves,” she’d said, “you must approach them with a clear mind. You must think about them.” The sifter was fixed when she found a misaligned part in the mechanism and put it right.

So she was going to have to think. The first thing she thought was to get out of the plane, it smelled like blood and gasoline. Because the belt was under the pressure of her weight unlocking it took some effort. She fell to the floor (ceiling) by pulling on the belt as hard as she could, lifting herself a little, and pushing the release when the belt slackened.

She crawled out through a broken window trying not to cut herself on the jagged edges. She was only partially successful as she got a cut on her shoulder and one on her knee. She also had a scratch on her forehead that wasn’t bleeding any more. A coagulated blood track from it ran up into her hairline, which she tried to wipe away with only limited success. She looked at the blood on her hand, almost black in the star lit darkness.

It was cold out, really cold, not just goose bump cold, not chilly, but that deep down cold that goes right through you. She thought maybe short sleeves and shorts weren’t very good choices for this kind of weather but they had dressed in tropical Florida. She looked around for her shoes, kneeling to look into the plane. They had kicked them off at the beginning of the trip and now were nowhere to be found.

I wonder if they’re ‘dead?’ she thought. She’d heard about ‘dead’ but had never seen any dead thing except for butchered meat (she just now realized the truth of that) but that didn’t really seem the same thing as this. Perhaps her mother and father were ‘dead.’ The thought horrified her as she came to the woeful conclusion that they were, indeed, ‘dead.’ The epiphanies kept coming, she was learning in quantum leaps!

“You must think about them,” her mother had said. Why am I not ‘dead?’ she wondered. Then she answered herself with, I could be, but I’m not. And it’s not over. I must find someone to help or I might be ‘dead’ too. She didn’t want to be ‘dead.’ She would cry about her family later.

So she turned to the dark woods that surrounded her, picked a direction and started walking.