There is no first class. We board all at once.
The forward toilet abuts the cockpit and is unisex.
13D is an isle seat, no matter what 13E and F say.
The faux-leather grey seats look just like in the commercials.
With a television monitor mounted in the back of every one of them.
It’s not like in the old days, when the in-flight film was free.
The headphones cost one dollar, three dollars for the nice ones.
And what you get is satellite TV. What you get is commercials.
You can’t turn the monitor off. It flies with you, inches from your face.
The default screen is a MapQuest map © 2003. Place names haven’t changed.
Fin Flon has not flip-flopped. Grand Prairie has not shrunk to Petite Prairie.
A white and windowless airplane icon pixel-pushes across the MapQest map.
Left wing grazing the 49th parallel, body long as the width of southern Manitoba.
Our fuselage overshadows Brandon, sets Swift River in its sights.
We cruse at 38,486 feet. Everything is downhill after that.
In Montreal, before take off, the MapQuest map said we sat at 36 feet.
And for a while I thought that’s how high the seats were off the ground.
We arrived in Calgary earlier than I expected.
The city met us at the airport at 3740 feet.
Now that’s first class.
. . . . .