Connecting Flights

"Connecting Flights" - a reading (on YouTube)


"Incoming" he yelled, ducking as the large shadow darkened his peripheral vision.

The plane had just turned onto the runway after an exhausting hour of creeping toward takeoff as rain and fog descended in a tattered curtain that played hide and seek with the blue and green tarmac lights, all but closing the airport. The air inside the cabin had grown warm, thin and stale. His face had grown flushed, his head light.

The cabin grew silent. His fellow passengers stared, apprehensive that he was one of them, one of the crazy or difficult ones that the evening news always warned them about. The men nearby tensed, ready to subdue him if he did anything more than raise his voice. The women slithered as far away as the cramped conditions allowed. Two flight attendants unclipped their harnesses and rushed along the aisle toward him, one forward, one aft. The farther was five rows away, the closer three when another passenger screamed, "Oh my God...."

She was cut off as the plane jerked to the right when the pilot swerved and gunned his engines, realizing his mistake, too late.

He hugged the seat in front of him like an infant desperately clinging to its mother. He curled his knees tight to his chest, his feet perched on the seat, hoping he could maintain his embrace with the cushioned security that his arms had wrapped completely around. He closed his eyes and turned his head like a lover moving in for a kiss.

His vision stuttered to a series of freeze frames jumping from one to the next. Reality became a strobe light at a rave with his mind clouded by ecstasy and his heart providing the thunderous beat. In the continuous-shot photography clicking through his head, he could see the shadow of the other plane descending, getting longer and larger and darker as each picture snapped by, click, click, click, until a wheel dropped into the frame bounded by the window and the wing, first brushing the top edge, then one quarter, mid-frame, contact. At that moment it seemed to snag on the wing frame after frame after frame with only slight waves of distortion around the connecting point as the metal folded and buckled. For those instants, time might have stood completely still, his mind refusing to move to the inevitable conclusion of the photographic montage.

Sound maintained its continuity but distorted. Like the Doppler effect after a sports car with a booming stereo had zipped passed, frequencies elongated, tones slowed and deepened. The high-pitched agony of tearing, twisting metal became a groan, the creaking he might hear in an ancient elevator as its cable strained to lift it. The scream of the jet engines receded to a gentle breeze stirring across the distant shore of a private beachside paradise that he alone occupied.

An instant later, time accelerated to ten times normal speed like a bachelor's DVR on extreme fast forward as he scanned recorded movies for the barest hint of exposed female flesh. Sounds returned to normal pitch though the volume increased until the highs and lows distorted. They pushed the limits of his eardrums like a high-school death-metal band amplified over aging speakers by an amateur mixer at 2 a.m. one Saturday at a nightclub called Diabolique. Metal screeched as the wing and wheel crumpled, rubber squealed as tires lost their traction, engines shrieked at impossible attempts at acceleration or air braking. Aluminum tore and crushed and rended. Children wailed. Adults screamed. Time stopped.

Perhaps his will had suspended the laws of physics. Perhaps his mind had become drawn into the moment as captured by a modern sculpture constructed from diminutive I-beams and rivets, all struts and scattered panels, alluding to aircraft without filling in all the details. One perched atop the other like skeletal dragonflies approaching a midair mating, seemingly defying gravity, connected only by one's wheel resting behind and beneath the other's wing. He could see the piece touring the country, garnering rave reviews stop by stop, with an itinerary crisscrossing the busiest air corridors, hitting all the major hubs: New York, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles. Its final destination Washington D.C., just off the fourteenth street bridge outside the Air and Space museum where a tour guide in a blue blazer detailed how the artist had captured the instant of impact with one plane seeming to float above the other, noting the roll and pitch and yaw as the top plane attempted to veer away and the minor skew as its partner had just begun to react. The gathered crowd studied the piece dispassionately beneath a cerulean sky with its unblemished puffy whites reflected in the tidal pool, contrasting the greens and pinks of the cherry trees as their blossoms shed one by one and floated toward a soft, water landing, stunningly beautiful even as their detachment signaled a slow, spiraling death.

The impact threw him backward, pressing him deep into his seat as the other plane imparted its momentum, lifting its partner's wing with its wheel as it attempted to continue flying, even just a few yards farther until it was clear, throwing them toward the white shroud draped just beyond his window. The plane struggled for lift like a young osprey thrown from its mother's nest. His stomach told him the pilot had succeeded, however briefly, in gaining air beneath their wings. He felt light, almost ephemeral, as the pair separated with a screeching whir and a reverberating thunk. He squeezed his eyelids tighter as he waited for the secondary impact, the one he knew would end in his shattered or fiery death.

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain. Sorry for the bumpy takeoff. We wanted to get airborne before the ceiling dropped and closed the airport. We just squeaked out before the last plane landed. Even though our departure was delayed, we should be able to make it up en route and get you to your connecting flights on time."


© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III