My Airship

It cuts through the night like a sharp whistle through silence. I have no crew, no destination, no port of call. I’m the only character in a Russian sci-fi film from the seventies. Instead of a mattress, moss grows atop my bunk. When I lie on it, its green whispers the names of ships that have vanished on this same course: Hotspur, Red Star, Windhover, Kintsugi. When the director says cut, an assistant brings the man in the moss suit a ginger ale. At craft services, the Russian dressing is just called dressing. I ask the script supervisor how long it takes to learn Russian, but she turns out to be a cloud. Sorry, she says, I only speak cloud. Each word languidly becomes the next, the way a cloud changes from a fish to a tree to a bird to a door. The sentence takes her over an hour to speak. I don’t remember anything from my semester of cloud, so I just smile and nod. When the shoot finally wraps, the ship is empty again. I anchor above a drive-in to watch myself on screen, but the film is punishingly dull, and I fall asleep fifteen minutes in. I wake up as the credits are rolling. The drive-in is empty. I brush the crumbs from my shirt and double-check my charts. When we lift off, I remember how to say airship in cloud. I say it softly, to myself. By the time I finish, I’m miles away.