November 22, 1963

by Christina M. Foster

They’d met the year before on a flight north and home from L.A.; he’d been just polite enough to her parents and he’d made her laugh when he told her she looked like Jackie with her dark hair and her linen sheath and the lap belt, still low and tight across her middle, didn’t pinch quite as much then. She re-arranged herself, settled a little then glanced at him — tall and blond and blue-eyed and not-quite-but-nearly chiseled, folded into the window seat and already miles away — and wondered if all the major events of their life together would somehow involve aircraft and emotional hopscotch. Neither Reno nor the round-cut emerald was the setting she might have chosen, and though she preferred emeralds to diamonds it startled her to realize she could so soon find eyes just as green staring up at her with another grave demand for love. Restless, she turned toward the aisle as the plane rose steadily into the early morning sun then doubled back, westward. Heights like these were dizzying. You were safer on the ground.

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Christina M. Foster currently lives and writes in Memphis, Tennessee. As it turned out, her own eyes are blue.