Plane Crash Stories

Journal Based Fiction By Stephen Elliott

Stephen.elliott@stanford.edu

The Racist

I'll die, I think, fantasizing about the stewardess in the first class cabin. I was close to sitting up there, and she has these great legs. Earlier I applied for an upgrade but the seats were already taken. My miles are worthless. All the airlines will be grounded soon. These are my horrible thoughts: she is a steak, a perfect piece of meat. Mainly, I'd like to be beneath her, where it's hot, but I wouldn't mind just watching her work, the V of her shirt, and her skin there. But instead, I'm in the back, seated near a baby and an Arab man. He could be Moroccan. He could even be a Sephardic Jew. I'm certain he is going to kill me.

The baby is crying, we're both going to die, our danger has made us base. We do not subscribe to a Kantian code of ethics. We do not care that our actions and thoughts are harmful to society. The baby and I are racist, though I am more so. But I feel more guilty as well, so I suffer more. Mostly we just want a tit in our mouth. The baby's mother is red headed and fair skinned, the father dark and curly haired. A mixed marriage. They are the ones, they will sacrifice their own baby. And I will never see the stewardess naked. My last memory: she is squatting in front of a fridge near the cockpit as I'm boarding the plane, there's a black man between her and I. Her dark blue dress is slit and riding the tops of her thighs and her legs are fattened by the pressure of her seated position while she digs through ice trays to soften someone's drink. It's eight in the morning.

On this same day, an article I have written comparing our president to Hitler is running in a newspaper with a half million circulation. I am a liberal mouthpiece. It is not quite true that I believe the Arab next to me is my murderer, but I have felt certain for a while now that I am going to die on a plane. Everything about the blond stewardess is true. I can't be expected to apologize for that. The baby continues to cry, the plane leans its nose back and bursts into the sky shaking with turbulence almost immediately. The wings are shrugging off.

Someone catches their breath. I hear a hiss; the sun shatters the eyeholes. I don't like myself, and what our society has become. My racism, that I've always had, I've always felt this way, I prefer to keep it below the surface, buried with heavy weights over it, where it can do no damage. Like everything else one knows not to be true but believes anyway. The baby raises her eyes and hands me her tiny shoe across the aisle. The Arab man says: I am very lucky she likes me. She doesn't like everybody. I put her shoe on my tray table and raise my eyebrows back toward her.

Last Night

I called my girlfriend to tell her I wouldn't be able to see her. I was leaving town in the morning at five a.m. It was already eleven at night. I was at a party and an hour away from home. I was feeling sick, I told her. I couldn't eat or drink. There were open wounds on the roof of my mouth from her fist, from when she stuck her entire fist into my mouth, forcing my teeth open, scraping the roof of my mouth with her knuckles.

She would see me, she said, before I left. On the news a French woman had been arrested for taking off her shirt in the airport, forcing the security guard to see her breasts. At the arraignment the judge said she would likely spend time in prison and the French woman broke into tears.

There was a girl at the party from my program. A small Hawaiian girl with a capacity for meanness named Angie. Angie said she came from a wealthy mother and a bum father. Her stepfather was a senator who liked to surf. She liked boys that were trouble. She got off on the drama. When I got home my girlfriend was at my door waiting for me. She'd brought a thermos full of tea. At four in the morning I was awake next to her, exhausted, sweating, panicked. The clock's digital red numbers were flashing. I had forgotten to get money for the cabfare. I was going to miss my plane, and that would mean missing other things.

Business Class

I landed without incident. There was dancing for hours in Chicago, old friends, bars in neighborhoods we had all moved away from. Then I saw children in a home in Champaign Illinois. A young girl asked how she could get more people to like her and I almost cried. I sat with the children locked in the detention center in Urbana. We talked about what they might do once they got out. Now I was returning to where I've been living, far away from where I grew up, on the western edge of the country, where the country sticks into the ocean.

I was on a plane that was going to crash. I was seated in business class because I upgraded my miles. There was all this leg room and intention. The woman next to me was a Republican, had said as much when the plane took off, had warned me that the labor unions were conspiring to bring down the government. She knew black people, she said, who took advantage of the system. It was welfare's fault. Teach a man to fish, she said. Her daddy was a farmer. He had sattelite television. We talked about books we liked, and hobbies and kept our earphones on so we could also hear music while we talked.

The water hit her first when the plane turned over at twenty-seven thousand feet, then the glass broke over her head. Before that we were comparing favorite movies. Hers was Grease, mine was Fight Club. None of that mattered when the wing came off. But I had known this would happen all along. But I had never known how time would slow. I could see the sound waves rippling across the stewardess's screaming mouth and the music stayed on and I caught a couple bars of David Bowie singing ≥For my mother my dog and clown.≤ The sky circled through the eyeholes and the food cart bounced between the roof and the floor throwing raviolies into the economy cabin. It seemed unnecessary. If the plane hadn't crashed I was going to meet my girlfriend at a book signing given by a poet we both admired. I'd only been dating her for eight weeks. She teaches German at UC Berkeley and goes on long bike rides through national forests. She always dresses in different colored layers. It probably wouldn't have worked out anyway.