---

Prologue

---

“All right, what’ve we got here?”

“A dead body, boss.”

Clearly it was a dead body, dead as a stuffed yorkie. The First Observer only thought it customary to ask such questions, even if he already knew the answer. He was a man obsessed with customs: cover all bases first by settling the basic truths of the case, then move on to more complex things…like hypotheticals. The First Observer was a great fan of hypotheticals. Still, he was self-conscious enough to know that only the most gifted detectives would entertain their own imagination before analyzing the evidence.

“I bet my Nanna’s prized Peterbald cat, this was an assassination,” stated the Second Observer, snapping a picture of the morbid image and typing lazily away on his smartphone.

“Very observant. An assassination seems about right. In fact, I’ll raise you one, and bet this man is…was a covert political official from another land,” affirmed the First Observer.

“You guys serious? You’ve only been watchin’ the body four bloody minutes!” the Stewardess exclaimed in amazement.

The First and Second Observers turned to the exasperated Stewardess, still reeling from her unpleasant surprise. In those four minutes of fantasizing what possibly could be the cause of death, they had forgotten there was another person in the room. The First Observer turned to his partner for an explanation.

“Ah, yeah, the chick who found the body.”

“Hmmm, I see…suspect number one.”

“Sorry?” stammered the Stewardess, “And how am I suspect number one?”

“By being the first person who came in contact with him when he was dead.”

“What about the person who killed him?”

“Ah, yes, back to the cause of death…” murmured the First Observer, placing his elbows on the corpse’s chest and intertwining his fingers like a scholar lost deep in thought, “That is the pickle jar to open, isn’t it?”

“No, this is,” complained the Second Observer, struggling to open a pickle jar that he had designated two hours ago to be his chosen snack that evening, and he was not about to change snacks all of a sudden. His fumbling irritated the Stewardess enough for her to reach over and pop the lid for him, eliciting the barest of thanks before he muttered between crunches, “Wait, boss, by your reasoning, doesn’t that make you and me suspects two and three?”

“I was hoping such a small detail would escape your reliable insight. I did not wish to incite panic among us. But, yes, you are correct.”

“Panic?” The Stewardess’ irritation now betrayed the sweat of self-concern.

“Indeed. By process of elimination, the killer,” the First Observer shifted his eyes from the Stewardess to the Second Observer and back again, “could be any one of us.”

“Process of elimination?”

“Indeed. That being, the process,” the First Observer gestured towards the corpse lying flat on its back, “by which this poor middle-aged man was eliminated.”

“But we don’t know what that process was, do we?”

“Exactly why we must exercise the proper customs.”

“Okay, well, I have an alibi.”

“Pointless,” waved off the First Observer. “Unless you want the people who vouch for you to be treated as possible accomplices. The whole plane could be in on it…there have been records of such murders on foreign railroads.”

“That goes for you an’ me, too? We might be accomplices?” the Second Observer double-checked between bites.

“Especially you and me. It would present the biggest pickle possible: which of us is the murderer, and which of us is the accomplice? I’d rather one of us remain innocent at least, if possible. In order to do that, we must uncover the process of elimination. Only then might we eliminate the peoples not responsible for this heinous elimination. If you and I are eliminated, in the figurative sense, we can proceed with a proper investigation.”

As the air around them thickened with mistrust and the scent of conspiracy, the Stewardess couldn’t help wondering if her safety was at risk, or only her sanity.

The First Observer set to work on the body. He peered and peeled and poked and prodded, until it became crystal clear to him that he had no idea how to start setting to work on the body. But he kept searching, for surely the suspicions of the other two bystanders would suspect him should he not turn up a single shred of evidence towards his own innocence. Finally, he found something he was certain proved his innocence, as well as the innocence of his partner.

“Aha!”

“Aha!” exclaimed the other two in unison.

Eyes glimmering with the tears of relief, the First Observer hoisted high a strand of hair plucked from the corpse’s sweater. It was long and auburn, matching neither the First Observer, who was bald, nor the Second Observer, whose hair was dirty brown and short. The First Observer held his hand over his heart and smiled.

“Oh….thank God. I was certain we were not murderers.”

“Congratulations, boss-man,” the Second Observer patted him on the back.

“What are you…what’re you crying for, that’s just my hair!”

The Second Observer reeled back in terror, brandishing a wheel of Gorgonzola as a shield. The First Observer jabbed a finger towards the Stewardess in judgment.

“A confession of guilt! We both heard you, we are witnesses!”

“You idiots, it probably got pulled out when he fell on top of me!”

“So there was a scuffle?”

“No! I mean…I don’t…”

“You better alert the authorities, boss-man,” mumbled the Second Observer.

The Stewardess groaned, face in her hands. She was more repulsed by playing a part in this madness, than by being falsely accused.

“But, if I am the murderer…wouldn’t that make you my accomplices?”

The First and Second Observers froze dead in their accusations.

“What the Hell you talkin’ ‘bout?” smacked the Second Observer between bites of a rotisserie chicken thigh.

“Hush, let her explain.”

“Um…well…” the Stewardess thought up the best way to match their line of reasoning. “You’re the one who said this guy was murdered in the first place, right?”

“Obviously. That’s why I’m the First Observer,” affirmed the self-proclaimed detective.

“Then, if you say my hair on the body is proof that I murdered him, aren’t you taking part in the murder by labelling him, ‘murdered?’”

The First Observer paled, telling the Stewardess she was right on the money. He nodded, shook his head, then nodded again.

“You are right…This hair only proves my involvement as well.”

The First Observer fell silent, glancing towards the Second Observer for reassurances. But the Second Observer was looking upwards, clearly avoiding his glance, preoccupying himself by chugging a carton of milk. The First Observer gulped emptily, and faced the responsibility on his own.

“I must have been wrong, then. This is not a murder.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“I am no murderer. So this cannot be a murder. That’s a valid conclusion. It does not defy the customs, either.”

“Nice thinkin’, boss-man.”

“Holy shit, this is ridiculous,” mumbled the Stewardess as she turned the body over to the abject horror of her fellow investigators.

“What are you DOING, woman?! You will contaminate the crime scene!”

The Stewardess studied the body of the middle-aged man, which was caked in dry blood…he must have been killed sometime in the middle of the flight. Unfortunately, most of his blood was still sloshing about in the overhead compartment, so he probably had stopped leaking. But the amount left outside the body promised a wound of considerable size, and sure enough, she located a puncture at the base of the jaw, covered by the middle-aged man’s scraggly red beard. His lolling tongue had slipped into it and clogged the hole, and the blood had just begun to clot.

The Stewardess pointed triumphantly at her find, and both observers stepped in closer to examine it.

“Incredible…You have solved the murder!” sighed the First Observer in relief.

“Um, noooo…you still have to find out who killed him!”

“You mean ‘what’ killed him.”

“No, I mean who, we already found the ‘what.’ It’s this hole in his jaw.”

The First Observer shook his head patronizingly at this elementary deduction.

“Firstly, you forget the murder weapon. In every case, the murder weapon is the single most important facet of the murder…even moreso than the motive and the murderer themselves! Secondly, how do you know what killed the victim? Was it blood loss, suffocation, shock…This puncture wound is only the passage by which cause and effect are joined. But what were the cause and effect?”

The Second Observer contributed to the hunt by bending down near the gaping wound, taking a few sniffs, and remarking with disinterest, “Smells like peppermint.”

The Stewardess had had enough. She didn’t spend her days losing track of time in the sky, traded around and disposed of as some seductive threshold idol to lose her mind arguing with the least qualified detectives on the face of the planet. Didn’t they understand how much stress her job required her to be in at all times? It was like they were all too happy to compound it.

“Okay, I’m done with both of you,” she exclaimed, throwing up her hands. “Do you not understand that the murderer is still out there? Families are in danger! Anyone out there could end up like this guy in a matter of minutes, and you’re both acting like a couple of dipshit kids playing at being detectives. Why don’t you shut the Hell up and do your jobs?”

A bright blush spread over the First Observer’s face as he sheepishly looked askance at the corpse sitting on the table.

The Second Observer chewed on a half-burned cigar and looked expectantly at his pal.

“The chick’s right, you know, boss-man.”

The First Observer blustered, he blushed, he burned with humiliation. But he was a man of customs, and nodded as if he already knew but didn’t want to come to terms with the fact he was out of his league. This was the sort of situation he had always dreamed of facing, but he knew he was no good at it. Why couldn’t they let him pretend for but a moment instead of bursting his bubble? But the moment was spoiled, and there was no use picking it back up again with half as much energy as he had going into it. Better let it fade away into a fond memory of briefly glimpsing something worth doing.

“Let’s get back to work, then.”

With those words, the First and Second Observers wheeled the cart holding the body over to a small iron cabinet. One opened the cabinet, the other pulled a lever on the cart, and the table tipped up until the body slid right into the hole. A swing of the cabinet, a press of a red button nearby, and they turned back to the Stewardess with the empty look of having completed a mundane task.

The Stewardess had no idea what these two did, it happened so fast. But when she smelled the stench of something burning, her eyes opened wide with horrified realization.

“What did you do?” she asked anyway, second-guessing her eyes for a second.

“Our job, as you requested.”

“Are you burning the body? Why the Hell would you do that?”

“Because it’s our job.”

“I don’t…I meant you should report the murder to your superiors! Launch an investigation with the police! You’ve been giving an autopsy, which isn’t your job.”

“What makes you think those other things are part of our job,” snorted the Second Observer.

“Aren’t you Airport Security?”

The First and Second Observers looked wryly at each other, the former fiddling with his glasses and muttering, “It seems you think all Airport Security exists within a narrow definition of the occupation. We are U.S. Customs Officers. Our expertise is in contraband. And this corpse is…was most definitely contraband.”

“Contraband? It was a freaking murdered human being! How is that contraband?”

“The definition of contraband is something that was exported or imported illegally. Illegally, in that it is not allowed or does not belong in the space created by the aircraft. That is, the aircraft is a reality in which contraband cannot be allowed. That corpse was something that cannot be permitted to exist within the reality of the plane.”

“Especially not this close to Christmas. Not good for the company, not good for the families,” agreed the Second Observer, who continued to sift through edible contraband and find new treats to dispose of. It was emphasized by an overly fervent nod from the First Observer.

The Stewardess could hardly believe her ears. Here were authorities, little as they actually had, blatantly covering up a murder because the murder shouldn’t have happened on the plane. A cover-up, an injustice permitted, all for the sake of keeping peace in the holidays.

“What about the families out there in danger right now? Any one of them could have a seat on their ticket right next to a homicidal maniac!”

“Ma’am, please. We work for the same organization, I’m sure you understand reason. Besides, everyone knows the risks of boarding a plane…Why, there’s a higher chance of the plane crashing into the sea than having your throat slit on a flight. The important thing is, we control what we can. What we can’t control, well…That’s called “Nature.” And we can’t control Nature, can we?”

“Yeah, what’re we gonna do, a little rain dance and hope the murderer goes away quietly?” laughed the Second Observer, squeezing a bottle of lotion into his palm.

The Stewardess sat down, dumbfounded. She had met thick-headed men before, but it was always emotional; they felt something wrong, and likewise felt they were so right in feeling that way. And their emotions betrayed when they knew they were wrong as well, in body language and in word. Winning emotional arguments with intelligent individuals is difficult, she knew that well, and knew that she would be in denial when she was wrong. But to win an argument of stupidity, where the reasoning was for the sake of reason, and the dictator of the argument was so confident in their own reasoning, she was sorely outmatched. How can you argue with a man of customs, who has so customized his world that it seems right to purge all contraband from passing through the gate of understanding? It wasn’t a man she was arguing against; it was a system. And she didn’t get enough paid vacation to take that on.

But the First Observer took the Stewardess’ silent surrender as a chance to elaborate further. The Second Observer had already found a sweater around his size in a pile of neglected textile, and handed his superior a coat to bundle up before they headed home for the day.

“The point I’m trying to make is this, and I’ll put it out there for you to consider: The key instinct in public service is to know what’s best for the people you serve. They rely on you to create a reality in which they feel safe, secure, and empowered to live life however they want it. This fellow, this murderer, whoever he is…Why, he’s just as much a traveler as the rest of them. Our job is to not keep him from transgressing the law – that is beyond our power – but to ensure his transgressions do not break the reality of safety and security that the airport creates for its charges. Perhaps, by example, he will come to understand the danger he poses when he sees just how wonderful an airport can be, and what he stands to ruin if his evil actions are discovered. I bet he will-“

“Especially so close to Christmas,” chimed in the Second Observer.

“Most definitely. And I’m certain he will see the error of his action by its possible consequences.”

In a last ditch effort, the Stewardess sprung up and shouted, “But how can that happen when there are no consequences? When you covered up his action by burning the evidence?”

The First Observer just smiled at her, as if to say: you will come to know in time. But in truth he had no answer. He just felt deep in his heart, in his convictions in custom and the expertise he had studying them, he just knew – he was right, one way or another. And there was no way to explain that to a woman who couldn’t understand, because she refused to listen to reason.

Father John chewed devotedly on the sharp end of his candy cane, still irritated by what the middle-aged man had said to him.

“A rose by any other name,” he chortled, marveling at what made this phrase so special that it should be repeated over and over again since its conception on the Shakespearean stage in all the wrong ways. Truly, mankind was filled with roses by any other name, all giving off the same uninspired fragrance, repeating the same uninspired phrases, following the same uninspiring steps in the same uninspiring dance. There were outliers, of course, but these were becoming fewer and far between – and usually germinated in terrible conditions.

The faux priest smiled gently. He was not at all opposed to terrible conditions. In fact, one could say terrible conditions were the source of his “Great Awakenings.” He had sensed a new one on the horizon, and the name finally revealed itself to him when he arrived at the Sydney airport a few days back. It would be the next recipient of his evangelism – the newest town to join the ranks of those truly “realized.”

The airport was decorated magnificently, with wreathes that looked as though they weighed a tonne, and magnificent garlands thrice as thick as any green anaconda, and far more suffocating. They gleamed over Father John as he passed beneath these verdant arches, making his way to the gate for his final destination. No one really saw him, and that was part of the joy he felt on journeys like this. No one saw him, but they would see what he did, and he could hear them whispering about his legacy as he passed by. Folks living in fear, yet still secure in the realities preserved by those dedicated officers in U.S. Customs. It really put him in the Christmas spirit, and he crunched the last of that nickel-tasting candy cane.

Arriving at the gate, Father John spotted yet another man whose bag was much too big for the overhead compartment. They seemed to be on every plane nowadays, and it tickled the Father when he saw folks glaring down their spectacles at this transgressor of that loosely-enforced law of travel (while his back was turned, of course). He himself did not personally care, always traveling light – it was the disposition of the transgressor that mattered to him. And watching this particular fellow, he seemed a right naive chap who simply didn’t care if he took up extra space. He didn’t feel or think anything of it – it was just natural for this traveler to travel as comfortably as he pleased. And this type of companion always pleased Father John. They were so easily converted.

While waiting to board, the ecstatic clergyman pulled out a book, which he had almost reached the end of, and continued to read. It was in Persian, and might have gotten him in trouble if anyone who worked at the airport knew how to read Persian. But he could count on the chance that no one did, and even moreso on the chance that no one would do a thing about it. It was essential that he finish before the end of the flight, though – He didn’t have time to fly to Heathrow, and from Heathrow to Kerry. Something was happening in Killarney, he could feel it deep in his dark soul.
It was his god’s will that Father John get to Killarney before Christmas. The people there needed his blessing as soon as possible, and, well, if he had to hijack the plane to get there in time…

Let’s just say, converting a flight plan would be an easy miracle for him.

---

Prelude to a Prologue

---

Let it be known to the audience, before we begin, that I don’t know the first thing about Killarney. I don’t pretend to know the first thing about it, either. Though it might be true I am at least aware that the name is attached to a small town in Ireland, near some lovely lakes and pristine parks…that’s about the extent of my awareness. To presume further would be pretentious and just plain duplicitous on my part.

So, for the sake of you, the audience, and for the sake of your pal, your friend, your unsuspecting writer who has chosen to write about something he knows nothing about for your own sake – heck, for all our sakes – I am telling you this indisputable truth. And make no mistake: this truth is not my truth. Opposing subjective “facts” have no solace in this story. No, you’ll find this a true truth, like how the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, how moths are attracted to flame, or how most carry-on bags exceed the acceptable size limit, and no flight crewmember does anything about it. Such is the level of truth I impart to you today, in telling you that most of what I will say about Killarney (the place) from here on out is fictional.

I can tell you are put off by my words… And why shouldn’t you be? We just met, and I am about to weave you a story that takes place in a completely unrealistic version of a very real town. But that doesn’t mean the story itself is untrue; if anything, knowing this only makes the story truer. So, to help you understand my position, and yours by association, I’m going to begin with a fable about the real truth – a pre-story story, if you will, like the delightful cartoon you’re forced to sit through before one of the great M. Mouse’s animated feature films. Think of my first tale as an award-winning short, if you will.

Here goes:

Two weeks before Christmas, a middle-aged fellow was on his way home to spend the holidays with his family. But “family” is such a loose definition in the modern era; to him, “family” referred to a posse of ne’er do well friends that had shared too much sin together to make their own family, and so settled with each other as the closest they could ever get to one. Same goes for “home.” Here, “home” refers to the RV the man would probably pack up and drive inland once the winter season had passed.

Our middle-aged fellow was in the midst of the mid-life crisis of a middling life. Said crisis begins with the realization of how unfulfilling this state of the modern household truly was, for nothing shed light on that limbo more than Christmas. Christmas is a time which glorifies traditional definitions of “family” and “home, and was therefore a time of unrest and deep-rooted unhappiness for him. He could not wait for the anticipation to be over and done with.

The Chicago International Airport was crowded, as always – another indisputable truth, but we’ll be here all year if we continue tallying those. The man had made arrangements to meet up with an old friend of his in Boston for dinner, drinks, and a side of hanky-panky (purely to relieve stress). Thus was the understood nature of their estranged friendship; waiting for it was irritating, ending it left him dissatisfied, but he could count on finding comfort in those twenty minutes of being hankedy-panked somewhat competently.

When his time came to check in, a chance-skewed glance alerted him to the fact that his second bag was much bigger than expected. In fact, it had been engorged with all of the worthless baubles and souvenir shirts accumulated in his travels. He wondered, how many glares were judging him, he who dared to bring that overstuffed duffel and take up precious space in the limited overhead compartments?

Looking about, he was overcome with the loneliness of registering no glares around him. On the contrary, everyone seemed occupied with their phones or their families. It was as if their glances were magnetically repulsed by him.
Reading their thoughts infuriated the middle-aged man. Behold, this cowardly new face of judgment: refusing the affirmation desperately needed by a fellow citizen of the world! Yes, they judged him…and they did so by daring to not look at him, The man almost would have preferred they sneer at him, rolled their eyes, anything at all. But, no, it’s so much more comfortable to keep one’s complaints to oneself.

The middle-aged man offered all these silent critics a very visible sneer, and dragged his two overstuffed bags onboard. No personnel stopped him, so he felt all the more justified and even pleased by his restraint in front of such a judgmental lot. They were probably the same breed of self-righteous narcissists who believe that the nuclear family is a truth, as much as they believe that the bag size limit on planes ought to be enforced. Let my sneer annoy them if my bags don’t, he thought – they deserve that much, at least.

The man took his seat near the window, exhausted at the hard work he put into getting his bag in the overhead several rows ahead of him. Now he could finally relax, drink some coffee, watch a movie…well, he couldn’t do that, thanks to the new pandemic regulations – touch-screens and all that. Cursing his decision not to bring a book for fear of packing too much, one of many regrets he had in his life that suddenly became front and foremost, the man’s eyes wandered out the window. Clouds promising snow, streets promising blood…it was all, all so very-

“Lovely, isn’t it?”

The middle-aged man jolted with surprise. He had expressly chosen this row because no people booked the seats beside him. And yet, and yet! Here was an audacious young man in priestly vestments, grinning mildly at him while simultaneously entranced by the city outside, sitting comfortably in the middle seat. Never mind he hadn’t even heard him sit down; could he not have the courtesy to sit nearer the aisle?

“No, not really” muttered the middle-aged fellow, hoping his tone exposed just how unwilling to converse he was.

“Hah!” exclaimed the Mysterious Stranger, clearly not getting the message. “You don’t even pretend to be agreeable. Can a city really be that revolting to you?”

“What are you asking for, Father, a confession?” was the mocking reply.

“Not at all. I’d rather hear your judgment.”

That word only proved the middle-aged man’s disdain. He rolled his eyes and looked back out at the city, a city raised from its famous fire to heights even more impressive than it reached before. All those glimmering windows, all those towering skyscrapers, all those bustling disparate lives…They prompted little more than a shrug from him.

“I hate cities. They’re ugly and flawed because they’re made by ugly and flawed creatures. Only human beings could build such nasty places to live.”

The middle-aged man was proud of his existential reasoning, retained from some long-ago liberal arts course at university. But the Mysterious Stranger seemed unmoved by his reasoning. Odd, considering how he was a young man, and young men of his generation were commonly prone to self-loathing. Odder still, he was a priest, according to his clothes, which typically crowned one with disgust for the sins and earthly ambitions of the human race.

Instead, the judgment crossed a secret thought of the Mysterious Stranger’s, which in turn gave him cause to chuckle – a cheerful chuckle, not one of irony or hopelessness. It might have been some inflection of the faint Christmas music above that made it sound that way, but the middle-aged man could not decipher why, of all things, his statement made this lad cheerful.

With the twinkle of calculation in his eye, the Mysterious Stranger leaned forward with a lurid grin unbefitting a man of the cloth. He was clearly a well-versed orator, despite his appearance, talking enthusiastically, but with a restraint and delicacy extending beyond his years. The middle-aged man suddenly felt he had become party to an intimate secret.

The Mysterious Stranger spoke thus:

“Consider a rose. A single, fragile, crimson rose. We notice its beauty, its fragrance, its danger, but do these things have any effect on how it grows? Does that plant climb upwards towards the sun because it knows that to do so would make it the epitome of roses in man’s esteem? Is it out of an instinct, to survive or hang on to the truth that it is, in fact, a rose worth beholding? Does the rose even know what a rose is, and what a rose should want beyond a single instant? No. It does none of these things, for roses cannot think. Yet, upwards it grows towards the light all the same, amassing fragrance and beauty and wielding its exceptional thorns. Why? Simply because that’s all it can do. Is that not why we have made cities – to continue to grow as a species towards the light? We embrace the full possibility of human ingenuity, and, by doing so, fully realize the epitome of ‘fellowship.’ That is, the city. All we can do is continue growing towards that truth, the truth of shared ideals, so that we may individually reach the same conclusion: to realize. By faith, and realization, we shall blossom into a rose more precious and exquisite than any other flower in any other garden. Or, forsaking symbols, into a human being more realized than any other in any city. All because we strive towards the light, the truth…the virtue of realization.”

As the Mysterious Stranger spoke, he became more and more animated, wrapping his one-man audience so tightly in his passion that the middle-aged man had a hard time wrapping his head around the Mysterious Stranger’s analogy. But it did strike him odd, that, “You know, Father, you didn’t mention much of God in your little love-letter to humanity.”

“Just because I wear a priestly gown, and mention words like “faith” and “fellowship,” does not determine my allegiance.”

“Hmph, I gotcha. A rose by any other name, am I right?”

The Mysterious Stranger’s face tightened. He forced a smile of acknowledgment to the middle-aged man’s quip, replied with a drawling “You could say that.”

And then…well, he then made no further efforts to engage the middle-aged man in conversation. Drifting further and further after that secret thought, it became clear that he had mentally ditched his neighbor at the runway. Then, the Mysterious Stranger went too far: he unboxed a long, hearty candy cane, and began incessantly sucking away at one end for the remainder of the flight. It was a clear sign that he would no longer be open for confessionals.

The middle-aged man was offended. He tried to meet the Mysterious Stranger’s eye, but it was fixated on something beyond him. He looked hungrily at the delicious candy cane, in the hopes that the Mysterious Stranger might demonstrate some of that good Christian charity. But his neighbor had moved on, and the middle-aged man quickly gave up under the pressures of rising frustration. Thirty seconds wasted on a vague adage, and he wouldn’t even be rewarded with an interesting conversation? Now enactments and reenactments of the debate that could have been would most certainly plague him all the way to New York. He could have worked out this Christmas pickle he found himself in – his discontent with the words “family” and “home” – for this Mysterious Stranger was obviously a man of wisdom by the way he carried himself and sucked on that candy cane.

Yet, the priest chose to act the miser by keeping all his good reason all to himself. How inconsiderate young people were these days, forcing him to pop pills just to sleep through the abrupt and uncomfortable end of their conversation. Melatonin wasted, just to keep from worrying what others thought! Why would anyone open that door, and leave it open?

After hounding down a stewardess who promptly brought him some ginger ale, he gave a sideways sneer to the Mysterious Stranger, a sneer he thought went ignored like their pseudo-conversation, gradually drifted in and out of sleep. Darkness finally came uninterrupted from the pills, paired with the slow rumble of the plane’s ascent. The middle-aged man’s last thought was, if the plane did not land before he woke up, that the Mysterious Stranger would excuse himself to another part of the plane. It was the kind thing to do.

It was a drowsy flight overall. When the plane touched down at JFK, you could feel the cabin’s energy returning in full force, bit by bit, as passengers prepared to push and shove a path to their connecting gates. There was not a whole lot of passengers, but it was still three-quarters full, and, when a three-quarters-full plane is convinced that, if they dart for the exit fast enough, they stand a chance of skipping ahead of the other three quarters, they get tangled with the flight crew and then no one gets ahead. Then, we have a whole lot of frustrating, foaming, fed-up travelers dealing with the biggest obstacle to a journey: other travelers. All this, compounded by the stress of the holidays. As they stumbled over each other, tearing bags down from overhead compartments, hasty to get on to another flight so they might be free to feel drowsy once again, the violence seems normal – never mind the fingers scratched and belongings trampled, it’s all part and parcel of the traveling experience. The afflicted would have a chance to sleep their complaints off as well, if being shoved turns out to be that much of an inconvenience.

Once the horde had passed on with the voracity of a stampede of early risers heading to the Vegas buffet lines, a stewardess picked herself off the ground where she had been trampled. She was used to this sort of thing – flicking off the gum transferred from someone’s shoe to her braid, stitching the rips in her skirt, searching for her nametag that had been kicked several rows down. These were the battle scars of the service industry, and hers were deeper and bloodier than any base barista at Starbucks. She brandished them with pride to the men who comforted her for the short nights in Dubai, or brief mornings in Shanghai. To them, she would be beyond time, cursed to fly over temporal frames from country to country, continent to continent. And, yet, even a heavenly being as she could be summoned back to Earth, subjected to the human wounds of eye bags and short-temper. This mix of the pathetic and the divine entranced the men she happened upon in her travels. They were often dying to be entranced, for the world had become a desert of unromantic designs, all tailored to reach one preferred outcome: the expected. No one expected a servant of the consumer to be so elevated in existence, nor the denizen from some aerial plane to be so beaten to the ground. Men were drawn to her grey eyes staring at night and day simultaneously, her auburn hair frazzled from the sugary glob she tore into pieces to remove. The Stewardess denied her men of the hour their expected outcome, and they felt rewarded by the unknown. And, after all this praise, after all this pride, after all this pleasure, she always got exactly what she expected: more and more tired.

The Stewardess resigned herself to that fate, getting on her hands and knees on that familiar search for her nametag, kicked under some random chair as it had always been and always would be. She found it, as expected. Rising, she found something else unexpected, and a sudden inexplicable thrill slipped down her spine.

All by itself in a seat by the window, alone and bloated as could be, sat a bag. A bag! Whoever heard of such a thing being left behind nowadays, when every thing one chose to carry was precious? What made the situation even more unusual was that the person who left the bag behind took the pains to strap it in with a seat buckle, clamp a pair of headphone around its top with the cord leading back inside itself, and lean the seat back. All this, just so a duffel bag could feel as nice and comfortable as any other passenger. Perhaps even more so, actually.

Oh, the Stewardess was overwhelmed by so many questions! Surely, the owner left their bag behind on purpose? Should she open it? Should she report it first, in case it was a bomb? Was the seat leaning back while they were landing, totally breaking protocol, and no one else seemed to notice? Didn’t the bag seem a bit too engorged, for both carry-on and overhead? While these questions, and many more besides, ran through her mind, the Stewardess was already unzipping the duffel. She was a woman possessed by the chase for the thrill; one does not let an opportunity like this go by, especially when the usualness in one’s life is so tempted with the unusual. She just had to see. She had to see the story out to its conclusion, to relate it properly later to those one-night gentlemen and entrance them further. Or at least learn the truth, so she could craft a more entrancing story. Maybe then…maybe then…she might start to become just as entranced with herself.

The duffel held nothing but disappointment. Clothes, condoms, and a sleeping bag about summed it up, and those three things caused her to be more tired than ever before. What was the point of hoping, if even generalities wouldn’t come true? She wasn’t asking for a bomb, or a decapitated head, or hundreds of dollar bills. She wasn’t asking for something more; she just wanted something other. But that clearly wasn’t happening this time, just as it never happened before, and would never happen period. So, with a grunt, the Stewardess heaved that abandoned duffel over her shoulder and opened the overhead compartment for the next flight, before she would sprint after the owner and probably receive no compensation for her hopes for compensation.

It was then that the corpse of the middle-aged man rolled out from the overhead compartment to land soggily on top of her, and she vowed never to hope again.

---