Here's some of my weekend work.  It's the possible opening of a new essay tentatively titled "The Blind Girl and the Cripple."

For the first time in twenty years, I'm boarding a plane.  The boarding chair hasn't changed.  It's still a narrow ledge of a seat welded onto a dolly.  I slide over from my wheelchair and perch on top of it.  Burly guys crisscross my body with straps and tie me in.  They say to fold my arms over my chest.  They check one last time, cinch the strap over my bosom tighter, and then tip the chair backwards onto its wheels.  I stare at the acoustic tiles.  Remember that scene in Silence of the Lambs when Hannibal Lector is rolled out over the tarmac?  All I'm missing is the mask.  A guy behind me, a guy at me feet, they bump me over the lip from walkway to plane.  I make a joke about fava beans and a nice Chianti, but they don't get it.  Beckie leans over me so that I can see her face.  I flick my tongue at her.  She gets it. 

Beckie is carrying all the parts we can possible detach from the wheelchair.  I've heard the horror stories of what happens once they whisk the chair away to be loaded into the belly of the plane.  She has the footrests dangling from her arms, the three hundred dollar cushion hanging from one hand, and most important of all, the joystick controller is bubble wrapped and pinned under her elbow.

I'm jerked past the stewardesses and around a corner to be pulled backwards down an aisle about as wide as an egg noodle.  I don't remember it being this pinched.  Even strapped tight, my thighs slide and catch against armrests.  If I stare down through my chest and beyond my footman, I can see Beckie following.  She has to shuffle sideways because of her wide load, but she's doing fine.  We can't let the airlines know she's legally blind in case our seats end up near the emergency exit.  They'd make us move—as if a woman who knows how to negotiate in a smoky, blacked-out environment is not exactly who you'd want to be feeling around for the release levers.  Today we're deep into the plane.  They don't seem to care what would happen to me sitting so far away from an exit.

The guys tilt me upright.  I wave them off as they start to unstrap me and do it myself.  I need a break from being touched by strangers.  Beckie is scanning for the seat numbers. 

"Look at a headrest and then look straight up."  I murmur it. 

Beckie nods, finds our numbers, and loads wheelchair gear into the overhead carrier.  I don't have a good view of the seats, but, as I've been warned, they've become much narrower.  At least there will just be the two of us in the row.  Beckie turns, and I get a better view.  There are three seats.  I sort of yell at Beckie that she and her fellow flying customers have been frogs in a two decade's long heating pot of shrinking seats.  Why hadn't they done something? 

"Middle or aisle, Hannibal?"  Beckie extends an arm over our seats and bows.