by
Jason Temujin Minor
The flight attendant rises above the aisle and floats in mid-air. There is no gravity and she looks confused. A second later, she slams into the bulkhead, splitting her head open. Reddish brown rain falls on Stuart Conrad’s face and spots his white dress shirt. The young girl next to him, eighteen at most, starts to scream. One continuous scream broken only by gasps for air.
Dropping his Game Boy, Stuart grabs the armrest and steels himself against the next hit; he knows this is not turbulence. The hit doesn’t come and Stuart looks past the screaming girl, out the portal window. It is sunny and bright with only a few cotton ball clouds. Everything looks calm. A trickle of wetness runs out of his short brown hair and down his forehead. He wipes it away – unknowingly smearing the flight attendant’s blood across his face. The other flight attendants, a white haired old man with wide-rimmed glasses and a black woman in her thirties wearing too much make-up, move cautiously, trying to get to their fallen colleague. She might be dead or out cold, Stuart can’t tell.
“Ladies and gentlemen, from the flight deck, this is your Captain speaking. We are experiencing some technical problems but we have the situation under control.” The sunlight shining through the window is gone, devoured in a cloud of gray smoke. “Please remain calm and we’ll inform you whe–” The speakers screech static and the lights flicker out. The cabin goes black.
Another hard jolt and screams fill the darkness. Something hits Stuart’s face. Dim back-up lights come on. An oxygen mask dangles in front of him. Stuart stares at it without comprehension. The old flight attendant has fallen on top of a young Asian couple. Apologizing, he struggles to get back on his feet. The woman is in tears, her husband yells. The black flight attendant has collapsed in the aisle next to her injured co-worker. She clings to a seat’s armrest and prays.
The plane vibrates violently. Luggage rattles in the overhead compartments. One hatch breaks and a leather suitcase – too big for the compartment – falls out, crushing an elderly white woman’s hand. Her bones break and blood sprays. Another shock, worse than before, throws the wounded flight attendant to the ceiling like a ragdoll. She falls back into the aisle, her neck twisting unnaturally. The black flight attendant watches in horror, tears run streaks in her mascara, but she still holds on to the armrest. A little boy sitting in the seat pounds at her fingers, trying to break her hold. “Let go, let go,” the child screams. The old flight attendant slams into the overheads, his glasses spin away and he falls to the floor. Blind and blinking, he feels around for his glasses, unaware his nose is broken and gushing blood. Stuart’s seatbelt keeps him secure but two other passengers are not so lucky. One is sprawled against the bulkhead and the second, a young soldier wearing fatigues, pops from his aisle seat like a jack in the box. His head strikes the circular vent and he falls on the woman next to him. Her burly husband pushes the soldier away, forcing his head into the aisle. Behind Stuart, a woman shouts, “My baby, my baby!” Next to him, the eighteen year old continues to scream.
What’s happening, Stuart thinks as this scene plays out. He can’t move, he can’t speak, and time seems to have slowed to a crawl. The plane is in trouble, but it’ll be okay, right? The airlines are the safest way to travel. Could the plane actually be crashing? It can’t be. He is supposed to be landing in L.A. in an hour. The flight attendant told him that, right before she flew into the wall and bashed open her head. A driver is going to meet him. The interview is at four – it’s just a formality. They already want to hire him. A start-up called “Lucky Rooster Games.” A ridiculous name for a company but it gets him to L.A. Who knows, a year from now he could be working on a movie. Someday he might even be working for ILM or, better yet, Pixar. That is what he had planned for today – not this.
Stuart feels lighter and his stomach rises in his throat. The black flight attendant isn’t praying anymore. Her thin braids are floating around her head and she looks confused. The boy stops hitting her fingers, turns pale, and vomits. It doesn’t run down his shirt, as it should. Instead, it floats out in viscous blobs. The boy’s mother straps on his oxygen mask and hugs him. She is crying. The dead flight attendant – Sara, her nametag reads – floats up in front of Stuart. Her lifeless eyes look into him but see nothing. Globes of blood orbit her like planets around the sun. The old flight attendant is swimming through water that isn’t there, trying to reach his glasses bobbing a few feet away. Debris clutters the air – a cell phone, a handbag, a pacifier, Stuart’s Game Boy, boarding tickets, pens, magazines, soft drinks, bile, and blood – a picture of chaos frozen in time. Most passengers, busy fumbling with their oxygen masks, don’t notice this once-in-a-lifetime spectacle. Stuart watches, mouth agape, he can do nothing else. Gravity is gone. The plane is falling. Planes aren’t supposed to do that but this one is.
He must be asleep and this only a nightmare. But the screams from the girl next to him are painful. They echo in Stuart’s head and threaten to burst his eardrums. You’re not supposed to feel pain in dreams. No, this is real. Stuart knows he is going to die.
A loud shearing sound roars through the cabin. The plane rocks and flings the old flight attendant back to the opposite side of the compartment, breaking his arm. The Asian couple’s heads collide. Blood bubbles from the man’s temple. He is unconscious. The burly husband, unable to figure out the oxygen mask, yells and begins to punch the seat in front of him. His wife tries to stop him. Stuart watches but can only hear the piercing screams of the girl next to him. He wants her to quit. He wants to wrap his hands around her throat and shut her up.
Stuart remembers her from the terminal. She’s attractive and had caught his eye. Too young for him, but there is no harm in looking. She talked on her cell phone, listened to her iPod, and tried to look older than she was – which only made her look younger. Their eyes met briefly, as they were waiting in line to board. She scrunched up her nose and gave him a look that reminded him of his age.
Something explodes towards the front of the plane. A chunk of burning metal severs the soldier’s head and nicks Stuart’s cheek, cutting a deep laceration under his left eye. He hardly notices. The soldier’s head doesn’t fall into the aisle. Instead, it moves with the plane, dancing in the air above the passengers. Blood shoots from it like fire from a rocket’s engines. The burly husband and his wife don’t notice. She tugs on his shoulder to stop him from punching the seatback. He turns on her, hitting her again and again. His rage is blind.
The young Asian woman takes her unconscious husband’s hand in hers, kisses his cheek, and rests her head on his chest. She closes her eyes and waits.
Stuart sees the madness in the burly husband’s eyes. He sees the blood trail from his fist as he pulls back to give his wife another blow. Stuart is incapable of acting. Not that he would know what to do if he could act. He turns to the Asian couple. In a different setting, they could be lovers watching a beautiful sunset. Stuart will be thirty-five in a month. Not old but not young either. And what does he have to show? He’s not married and has no children. No one to carry on after him – no legacy. Stuart spent too much of his youth partying with girls like the one screaming next to him, too much time playing video games and drinking with his buddies. And that was fine; there was plenty of time.
Smoke pours from the cockpit and fills the cabin. Stuart coughs but can’t remember what he is supposed to do. He doesn’t see the oxygen mask hanging in front of him. Amazingly, the girl continues to scream, smoke or no smoke. The sound cuts Stuart worse than the flying metal. But he understands why she screams. She’s trying to hold off death.
He doesn’t know the girl, doesn’t even know her name, but Stuart envies her. She’s young and probably has a head full of dreams. And she probably thinks they’ll all come true…someday. But she’ll never know the feeling of turning thirty and realizing she’s a nobody. Like Stuart did.
Shortly out of college, Stuart took a job doing QA for video games. It’s not what he wanted but it got his foot in the door. What Stuart wants is to be an animator. Specifically, he wants to animate for films. He’s never told his friends this, but he’s been working on a script for years – an animated children’s story with an adult message. He knows it will make a great movie, one that will truly make people think – maybe even challenge their beliefs. It’s his masterpiece. He’s been working on that script for ten years and he is still only a QA manager. Stuart always thought he would get his chance one day. When Lucky Rooster Games liked his animation reel and wanted to fly him in for an interview, Stuart knew this was finally his big break. He might yet make his movie; thirty-five is not that old. Stuart could still leave his mark. He could still do something people would remember, he could make a difference.
He could have before today.
A deafening whine of rending metal comes from behind Stuart. The plane lurches again and a hurricane wind rushes over him, sucking the smoke away. All three flight attendants, the soldier, his head, and a few unsecured passengers follow. All are gone. The burly husband continues to beat his dead wife until a loose chunk of plane catches him on the side of the head. The blow unhinges his jaw and forces him out of his seatbelt. He tumbles head over heels out the back, along with the others.
This has to be it, Stuart thinks. The ground must be close and when they reach it…that will be the end of Stuart Conrad – son of James and Margaret Conrad. His parents will grieve, his few friends will mourn him, but he will have done nothing to make the world a better place. Stuart’s script will never become a reality, he will never see his name up in lights, no one will want to interview him, he’ll never have a star on Hollywood Boulevard, he will never have a family, and no one will love him again. But right now, none of that seems important. In the end, maybe all that really matters is the lives he has touched, the people he has helped. But whom has Stuart helped? Whose life has he made better? Whom did he serve? The answer is no one.
The eighteen-year-old girl is screaming. She is going to die. Stuart is going to die. He can’t save her anymore than he can save himself. There is only one thing he can do. Stuart grabs the girl by the shoulders and she stops screaming, her tears sucked away in the wind. She looks into his eyes with fear, desperation, and need. Stuart takes her into his arms and strokes her hair – a father comforting his daughter, a friend reassuring another. She weeps silently against his chest. And as the ground rushes up to meet them, she whispers, “Thank you.”
Stuart Conrad smiles.
End
