
In Plane Sight
“I’VE NEVER KEPT SHEEP / But it’s as if I did.” How did these two lines of Fernando Pessoa’s poetry irritate a person like me, often considered a novelist, enough to write a multigenre book full of short pieces and images called Pilot Impostor? The short answer is that the couplet collided with a swarm of issues all at once in an airplane above the Atlantic Ocean.
My husband and I visited Cape Verde, off the west coast of Africa, in December 2016. Most TAP Air Portugal routes there require a transfer in Lisbon, so we decided to stop there for a few days on the way back. Whenever I go to a new