My Body Flies Over the Ocean

The first thing that crossed Dayle's mind when she received the phone call to finally journey to Nachton was "I hope Amy likes living in America."

Of course, she had been aware of her sister's occasional excursions to the fledgeling land, quite often shaking her head as her sister relayed the tales of her experiences and exploits. She also knew she would be very unlikely to take a boat to The New World, and while air travel was relatively new in the scheme of her lifetime, she really didn't want to spend eight-plus hours over water, even if it was tens of thousands of feet above.

Packing her bags weeks later with the remainder of her travel clothes, she tugged her three stacked, full-sized trunks and the luggage through the door of her family's home.

It pained her to watch her closet drive away in a shipping truck. It horrified her to know it would be enduring the sea at wave-level, cresting the arc of the horizon days after she herself would be landing in Nachton's International Airport.

Taking hold of the top trunk and her luggage stacked on top, she stepped carefully down the stairs. Half wishing she had grown into gliding, as opposed to perception, she repeated to herself the city's name, in a variety of different pronunciations.

"Nack-tun. Nock-tone. Nach-tun. Natch-tun. Natch-tone." Rolling the word around in her head, she realized it didn't matter very much how she pronounced it. If she pronounced it wrong, according to those she would meet, they would brush it off as the strange idiosyncrasies of a British accent. They didn't realize, however, and probably would not for quite some time, that not knowing how to pronounce it as it should be would drive her nuts - well not literally. She promised herself she'd refrain from referring to the city by name until such time as one single, correct pronunciation locked itself in her mind.

It didn't help that she couldn't remember how her point of contact had said it.

**

Dayle arrived with her sister at Heathrow Airport rather early for their flight. She'd tried for almost a full day to talk her sister out of wearing a gown while flying, but her twin would have none of it. "You're wearing what you find comfortable, Dayle, and so am I," she'd iterated several times. Frustrating as that woman could be, Dayle loved her sister and would go to the ends of the Earth, the end of time, with her and for her. She gritted her teeth and just zipped up the silk gown.

Heathrow was quiet, as it tended to be at two in the morning. Dayle had brought her sister to the terminal often enough to recognize the waves of departures and arrivals. As they sat down at their gate, she watched the people arriving. Eyes bloodshot, legs unsteady. She heard one older gentleman complaining as he leaned against the wall in a thick accent that she recognized as Texan (from watching too much telly), "Mah ass is asleep, Gladys." A woman she assumed was Gladys covered her mouth and buried her face in his shoulder, her laughter shaking her body, and after a moment, the man joined her.

The departure time ticked closer. She and her sister sat quietly, speaking little, outside of jibing each other saying "I hope you brought such and such an item."

Ysabel retorted at one point with a rather logical comment: "It's America. We can buy what we don't need."

A plane appeared outside the windows of their gate. Dayle leapt out of her seat and turned to her sister. "Drink?" The more elegantly dressed and structurally-coifed mirror image of herself shook her head. "I need one. I'll be back."

Muttering to herself, she entered the single pub - the Shakespeare Ale House - and walked up to the counter. "Guinness, short, and a Bloody Mary please."

"Identification?" The keep didn't look sure of her age. Sighing, Dayle dug in her purse and dragged out what she hoped was the correctly dated card. She handed it to him and was grilled as he stared at the rectangle of plastic and paper.

"Age? Sign? Birthday? President of the United States when you were born?" Of course, she had to wrack her brain for that last one. The card she had handed him indicated she was twenty-two, she hoped... "Twenty-two. Sagittarius, cusp. Got lucky on that one. And it would have been Reagan, though, really, you should be asking who the Prime Minister was, which of course as you know would be Margaret Thatcher, but then I don't need to read the photo over the doorway behind me to know that." He glared at her a moment, then handed her back her card, and pulled up a short glass.

**

"I don't want to fly, Amy. Why can't we just teleport like in Star Trek? It would be so much easier. Then we wouldn't have to worry about the ocean," she complained as waited in line to be seated. Dayle never seemed to slur her words when she was inebriated. In fact, the Guinness and the Bloody Mary were too small to cause her more than a mediocre buzz, and make her extremely relaxed. Her fear of the ocean was one of her more debilitating flaws, but she was determined to get to America without flipping out, growing a canary, or ripping any major body parts off anyone. (Though she reserved the right to follow someone into the rest room to join the vampire's version of the Mile High Club.)

She'd slept little during the days prior so she could sleep most of the flight, and the alcohol only helped her get onto the plane itself. Slamming her window's cover down, she nestled into her seat and leaned her head on her sister's puffy silk-cushioned shoulder.

**

She looked up at the glistening outside of the entrance to the Domicile that she was directed to. She ignored her twin's departure to the best of her ability as she walked up to the entrance. She'd offered, rather nicely she thought, to drop Amy off at Heolfor Manor first, especially since it was less out of the way... but her sister demurred. "That was nice of her, I s'pose," she said to herself as she turned away from the door, turned to a nearby alley, and walked down a few yards. There she found a standing sewer grate, tugged it open, and stepped inside.