Тим Леббон - New Fears 2 - Brand New Horror Stories by Masters of the Macabre

We’ve got an empty seat next to us and a vastly obese person next to that. This is how vast. She even asks for an extension to her seat belt. Jesus Christ! I give thanks for that middle seat, unoccupied. I look at my man and think, you ducked a bullet there, compadre!

I end up on the floor for take-off, his Caterpillar boot on my groin. (I think orange face has a hand in this, I swear.)

I’m starting to regret he didn’t choose one of those painted clogs or a bottle of advocaat.

I grin all the way up his jeans and Mambo shirt and chin to the reading light spot-lighting his chest. He isn’t nervous, even when the massive weight of the plane leaves the runway, lifting like a feather. He doesn’t grip the hand rests. His eyes don’t leave the in-flight magazine.

I think the son of a bitch has forgotten about me, immersed as he is in first-rate journalism about foreign climes.

Then, just when I think I’m a fucking afterthought, he picks me up and I’m on his lap again like a ventriloquist’s dummy and Schiphol is history.

The obese one gives a raised eyebrow. A hideous hello.

My guy flickers a smile back. Neither wants conversation. Good. There are some things these plastic ears are not built for.

As the plane levels he settles and I settle too. He’s pretty comfortable, after all. Pretty well sprung as mattresses go.

Enjoy the rest of your flight, blah blah.

Melbourne-bound, he gazes down at me, thinking of his child. The idea of her expression greeting him changes his. It lightens, almost blooms. I’m thinking this is looking optimistic, but I know it’s not, and can’t be. That’s not the nature of it. Not the nature of me.

So, this.

It’s got to happen, but I’m never quite sure when it will. Sometimes it comes out of a clear blue sky, so to speak. You never can tell. Sometimes my buttocks clench and I can feel it coming. Other times, it’s a sucker punch. And you know what? You never get used to it. It’s never easy.

This time, I kind of know.

Kind of.

That way he looks like he is drifting off to sleep. Those heavy lids. The memories. The desire. Then it’s like a big church bell chiming in my head, through my body, and it’s like he’s pressed a button he didn’t even know existed.

I wish this flight would end quickly.

No. No, don’t wish that, you fuck. You idiot. But too late—it’s done. The die is fucking cast. No going back. (I fucking hate my job sometimes.)

For the technically minded, it’s an SA-11 Buk surface-toair missile system down there. A dot in a field, invisible from thirty-two thousand feet. Recently trundled over the border into Eastern Ukraine by pro-Russian rebel fighters.

I’d like to tense but my innards are cheap foam.

The missile hits.

My man’s arms lift from the arm rests.

He feels the boing, the Boeing do press-ups. Everybody does, terror escaping like a puncture, a slashed tyre.

It hurtles. Dropping. Knotted stomachs in the air. Grumbling not from airline food. Not from stomach complaints. Compliant in zero-g.

Lockers spring open, clacking Jack-in-the-boxes. Oxygen masks dangle and sway in rhythm, like choreographed marionettes, kicking like the feet of can-can dancers then streaming back at the plunge.

He looks back.

Someone is horizontal like Superman, spectacular green-screen work. Outside the tilting window green fields rise to meet us at a rate of knots. Knotted loops in the bread basket, as bread baskets spin like tumbleweed from Business Class.

Blue collar, white collar, all get their top buttons undone. All get their Adam’s apple freed to gasp breath and scream.

He wished for the flight to end quickly, and so it does.

Brace. Brace.

He whimpers, hunches, forearms helmeting his head. Buries his face in me the way a child might at beddie-byes. I give him warmth. I feel his pulse galloping. But I’m grinning. Always grinning. Can’t stop it. Can’t change.

As the metal casket dives and dives and dives he prays to God, which he never has since kindergarten, remembers the chickens they kept and fed, and how one pecked him once and he didn’t think that of chickens.

Little does he know there is no God listening, just an ape.

God, please God, please God, let me see my daughter one more time before I die!

His second wish. And it’s almost too easy to oblige. It has happened before I even think about it.

The locker above springs open. Luggage vomits out, spilling exuberantly across the seat backs. His coat a swirl midair. His mobile phone spat out of its pocket, hitting a head rest and landing randomly in the space beside him, which he misconceives as luck, snatching it up and switching it on.

It glows into life and colour, showing the child, gaps where her adult teeth haven’t come through yet, freckles she always gets in warm seasons. His eyes. His wife’s sarcasm.

There.

You’ve seen her one last time, I say to myself.

I’ve given you your first two wishes—what’s your third?

His fingers, wrapped round the phone, tremble.

All about him reigns blasphemy and chaos. The fat one’s bowels have vented. Which is only a microcosm of it.

God comes into it again, both of him and the hundreds of others, in unison and yet each alone, they call out, inwardly, to their fictions and comfort blankets.

Oh God, oh God, oh God, please let me die quickly and without pain.

And so.

Impact.

He does.

We hit the cold grey field of the Donbass and his third wish eventuates.

We spread in a million fragments over a nine-mile radius, a galaxy forming of trash, belongings, chunky airport paperbacks, playing cards, letters home, old vinyl records, internal organs, hopes, and in-flight beverages. And what part, or parts, of it are him I don’t even know any more. It’s not my business.

Your story is over, Mambo shirt. My involvement in it, ditto.

I’m lying on broken metal, maybe wing, maybe fuselage, its heat slowly cooling like a body after sex. Nothing clinks or clanks or breathes or moves or mutters or prays any more.

I lie on this sun bed considering the musicality of distant rooks, which is non-existent and ultimately, fucking irritating. Not much I can do about that. It’s always a waiting game between one host and the next and you get used to being at peace with that. But it’s a fucking bore.

Passage of time I’m not great at.

I hear a tractor.

Voices. DPR insurgents, so possibly not a tractor, more likely a jeep.

Ho hum.

Military boots, the kind that lace tightly halfway up the calf, crunch through the debris. Somebody picks me up. Behind him, the devastation. Not a pretty sight.

Bodies lying everywhere, decomposed, burned, others mangled together, indistinguishable. Nobody is removing them, even touching them. Not from reverence but from indifference.

The one holding me in his fat hand wears a camouflage cap, cigarette dangling from a slug of a lower lip. Seven o’clock shadow like he just bathed in charcoal. Belt heavy with ammo and tools of war. The others wear balaclavas but him, not. The others have shaved heads. Him, no.

He turns to people with cameras. Holds me up, a soft toy gorilla, flappy-limbed, my fur coated with dust and ash.

I hear the lenses clicking. If lenses click. They probably fucking don’t. I have no idea.

Ratatatatat.

He walks around with me hanging from his hand for a while. Then for a longer while I’m tucked behind the leather strap across his chest.

A toe prods this. A toe kicks that. This continues. Someone beckons. Someone shrugs. Someone yawns. One fans a wallet out, plucking cash and credit cards with crow-beak hands. Another hyena’s jewellery. The radio in the jeep crackles with sibilant authority but it’s unintelligible. Maybe ghosts swim between the syllables. Who knows?