Robertson plays out the crash for us in staccato lines of sound. It is sickeningly real, haunting in the tomb of linguists where our speaker resides. Dissecting the sounds is way of memorializing the victims in a bizarre funeral-like setting. The speaker - gender-neutral and anonymous - uproots memories of her sister in a parallel narrative to the dead bodies she listens to on tape. The story is full of packaging: the untouched vending machine, the artificial lemon tree, the attempt to make sense of death by documenting spoken words that can't change anything. The characters seem to know this, but they are afraid to succumb to the mess.
This story is fresh and captivating, though risky in its style. The sentences are stark and simple, absent of cluttering description. The speaker bottles their emotion until the end, when they are flooded by paper cranes that represent the deceased Joy, their dead sister, and the birds that tore the plane from the sky.