It was a cloudy night beside the airport fence. The streetlights glowed orange, the runway lights blinked on the far side of the wall, and everything was quiet apart from the hum of the city.
Then the sound arrived before the plane did. A big jet came in low, its belly lit up, so close overhead that you could make out the engines and the landing gear against the clouds.
A few seconds later it was gone, and the street went back to normal: the corner store’s lights, the traffic, the billboard. Thirty seconds, one plane, and a moment you can’t really get anywhere else.
