Landing
How was your flight? as the door closed on the pouring rain with a thump. the rain and recently open door made the car’s interior oddly humid.
‘ever landded in a thunderstrom/’ B asked?
‘negative’
‘well, it was pretty nuts. first off, it was like I could see the front of the plane in front of me swinging like a pendulum… whichof course if you read tha tpiloto’s book, yo know that’s bullshit’
‘…right…’ <like they talked about on science friday, the anonymous pilot who wrote about the airline industry>. A glanced at all the mirrors, then wound the wheel and snuck out into the traffic lane from the pickup lane
“but it felt that way, y’know?. Anyway, the whole plane is lurching around, people are yelping, and for some strange reason the lights were blinking. or maybe I’m just imagining that that happened. I could probably convince mysef I’d; see then air masks drop too, if I tried”
A smiled as he negotiated the airport’s exit traffic in rain so heavy it was all the wipers could do to reveal tail lights a few meters ahead.
“Anyway; this huge black dude…”
“whoa whoa whoa, why’s the man’s got anythignt odo w itht his”
“haha, well nothign, but I’m painting a pciture. the guy must have been six-four, two sixty easy. like,
“aight I’ll allow it”
“Well, this fuckin’ dude, i nthe middle of this roller coaster ride, he thinks that just the thing to calm everyone down is to start singing Amazing Grace. And from the way this dude sang… you’d think his whole body was just lung inside. So he starts belting this shit out, and I kid you not, it sounds like there’s a goddamned pipe organ on board this plane. And i’m thinking to myself… ‘this is a song people sing at funerals… everyone’s about to lose their shit’.
And the plane is still lurching all over… but everyone’s gone stone quiet. Just the engines and creaking of the frame in the wind. No more yelping, no more astonished gasps… just… this guy. Then. /then/ a woman in back /joins him/. And this is all happening in like a dozen heartbeats, so she’s coming in right at the “I once was lost part”, so we’re really just getting going. Then it was like that video of the guy dancing ant Coachella… the whole plane goes along with it. 8and the flight attendants*. Get this — im not sure how he heard us, but the pilot gets in the PA and jumps in too. Unreal. before we knew it, the whole jalopy was bouncing into a shearing landing and pullig up to the jetway”
some bullshit about what A s doing with the drive. maybe roads or rain or something. maybe the rain is dissipating.
“Then we all filed off the plane in absolute silence. nobody spoke a word as they got their overhead luggare or filed off the jetway. I think a few people had snapped out of it by luggage pickup, and there was hugging and tears. Strangest experience ever.”
Welcome to … place? what place has enough storms and does it matter if it’s meaningful?