Beware of Flight Attendant

by Cactus Moloney

  Ezra watched from the other end of the plane as the heroine, Carmen, pulled a bag out of the compartment above the last row, near the toilets. She then rushed with the large bag in her arms to the front of the plane to assist the hurt passengers in rows seven through fifteen—those who had survived.

  “Daddy can we drive back to Las Vegas?”

  He didn’t answer. He moaned and squeezed her hand.

  “I remember what disorder I have daddy…aviophobia…a fear of flying.”

  41 Senator Mike Young

  “The dog has been terminated!”

  The senator heard the flight attendant announce the slaying of the dog over the intercom.

  He didn’t want to come out of the bathroom. During his time spent in the enclosed safe space, he felt his intoxication begin to dissipate, followed by an all-consuming shame for his earlier actions. He wanted to avoid facing the women who had witnessed his behavior; assisting with beating an airline flight attendant unconscious—he was sure that was a federal offense—as well as helping defend the first-class section at the peril of his fellow passengers.

  He needed to figure out how he was going to play the story to the press. Of course, the media would be waiting on the tarmac for the plane’s arrival. He knew his name would be plastered across the news channels. This could impact his campaign positively or negatively depending on how the media decided to portray him.

  “Bad publicity is better than no publicity,” a friend had once told him.

  The senator wasn’t so sure if he needed any more bad publicity, especially with his name wrapped in the recent women's health care controversy.

  He felt the impact of the airplane as it set down on the runway, listening to the squealing of the wheels and the screeching brakes pulling the plane to a slow crawl along the tarmac. He was jarred about in the tight bathroom, banging his elbows against the sink and the wall, while trying to keep from slipping on to the urine stained floor.

  “Please stay in your seats until I give the okay to exit the airplane,” the captain directed the passengers.

  The senator waited for the plane to stop taxiing before he stood from his coward's position on the toilet. He faced his reflection in the mirror. The unfamiliar image returned to him a man rumpled with drops of blood staining his shirtfront and sleeve cuffs from the flight attendant’s bleeding nose. He pushed the water faucet and lukewarm water ran over his shaking hands. He smoothed his wayward blond hair down. He couldn’t do anything about his glassy red eyes from crying and drinking too much alcohol.

  He realized he had forgotten to pray to God.

  God was the senator’s business as a politician. All fundraising luncheons included a prayer. In each speech he made sure to include God or Jesus at least twice.

  “God’s blessing has been on Florida from the very beginning, beginning with the Spanish conquistadors...and I believe God isn’t done with Florida yet. I believe in Florida. I believe in Palm Beach! I believe in the power of millions of courageous conservatives to make Florida great again.”

  He carried a Bible in his briefcase. He had a sticker of the Ichthys, or the Jesus fish, on the back of his Mercedes Benz. He brought his lovely wife and two pint-sized blond girls, dressed alike in perfect petticoat dresses and patent leather Mary Jane sandals, to the Crossroads Mega Church on Sundays. He would bribe the girls with the church’s state-of-the-art technology: Bible apps, Christian rock music performances, active youth ministries, a playground and skatepark, but mostly with sprinkled chocolate donuts offered after service. He prayed to God every Sunday; for no more school shootings, for the hurricanes to spare Florida, and for the rising waters to slow down—at least until the next election was over.

  After church one Sunday, he stood next to several influential church members, while his diminutive daughter nibbled on her donut; chocolate sprinkles fell on her dress and stuck to the corners of her rosy lips.

  “Grace tell us...how was Sunday school today?” A parishioner inquired of the little blond girl.

  She took her time and finished chewing her chocolate bite, swallowed it with a gulp, before informing the audience, “You sure got to have a big imagination to believe all that!”

  If God could forgive his little girl for questioning her faith, and embarrassing her father, then God would surely forgive him for making a mistake too. Mustering all his will, he unclicked the lock to show vacant on the bathroom door and stepped into the airplane cabin.

  The woman with the tortoise shell glasses gave him a look of condemnation. The tattered stewardess was slumped in the seat behind the pissed-off woman, with her concussed head nodding off her shoulder. Drool pouring from her mouth. Blood had crusted to her nose, lips, and chin, and had run down her white shirt. In the back row the senator could see that Derek was peeking through the curtain, ascertaining the economy class’ misfortune. Next to Derek, the pretty young woman who had snuck through a break in the wall grimaced with her sultry red lips. She arched her back with her eyes pinched shut from the pain. The senator slinked back to the seat next to Stacy.

  She looked at him with pity.

  “I suggest you separate yourself from that Derek Beeman guy,” Stacy said. “It wouldn’t look good for the campaign if people knew that you would align yourself with a man who beat a flight attendant unconscious and potentially helped a Pitbull massacre innocent people would it?”

  Out the window, the senator could see the media waiting, as well as the police, and the strobe lights flashing on the waiting ambulances lined up on the tarmac. His heart was racing. He was going to be crucified.

  “Oh yea, I forgot,” Stacy said. “I quit.”

  The doors swished open from the galley area and emergency crews came rushing onto the plane.

  “What’s this food warmer doing here?” One of the uniformed men asked about the forged wall. “Help me get it out of the way!”

  The senator watched Derek stand up and take the other end of the cart, assisting the EMT by pushing it to its rightful spot in the galley. Another EMT began helping the injured young woman in the heeled boots. Derek returned from the galley, taking the aisle seat next to the senator. They waited with the other first-class passengers for the plane doors to open.

  “So are you still interested in the Miami Vice speedboat ride this afternoon?” Derek asked the senator.

  “Who are you?” The senator looked at Derek with blank bloodshot eyes, as if he had never seen him before. “And why would I ever want to go anywhere with you?”

  FRIENDLIEST DOG IN THE WORLD

  42 Barberella Johnson

  Barberella’s belly fat shimmied when the plane set down on the runway. She kept her eyes closed. She had been in a deep sleep, finding no reason to open them, until the plane completed its taxi to the gate.

  She waved to the audience with her beauty pageant hand curl, her long blond tresses flowing over her perky breasts, barely hidden by a shiny red, high-sided swimsuit. A white satin sash covered her chest ‘Miss Texas 1992.’ The announcer wearing a tuxedo, placed a zirconia crown for a queen on top of her head. People cheered. A girl handed her a bouquet of red roses.

  The faint sound of the captain’s voice droned on, keeping her from her happy place...far far away from reality.

  “Won’t he just shut up?” She groggily tugged her noise-canceling earphones from her head.

  The voice of the captain belted over the speaker but was drowned out by the sound of people yelling. The chaotic chatter was totally unexpected. The acrid metallic smell of blood had penetrated the airplane through the recycled air system. It was her first sense that something was amiss. Barberella dropped the headphones onto the middle seat and stretched her neck to inspect the pandemonium.

  “Please remain in your seats until I tell you that it’s okay to exit the airplane,” the captain directed passengers. “First and most importantly, we need you to stay seated while the emergency response crews board the plane to assist those who were injured. First they need to
remove the passengers needing medical assistance.”

  Barberella heard people screaming, “Let me off!”

  “Leave your personal carry-on luggage and any bags on the plane,” the captain explained. “Airline staff will collect your bags and carry-on items after you have exited the plane. The emergency slides will deploy at each of the exit points after the doors have opened. I know this is a stressful situation. Please remain seated until the emergency crews have evacuated the injured. We are asking first class passengers to exit through the front and coach passengers to exit through the back of the plane.”

  Barberella pulled her substantial weight up by using the seat in front of her. She surveyed the scene with astonishment. On the aisle floor next to her, lay a massive dog strangled by a seat belt, and then apparently pummeled to a pulp by the bloody cane that lay abandoned next to it. Behind the gore that was his face, she could see one eyeball hanging by a thick vein and the dog’s tongue fully extended and purple from strangulation.

  Barberella was familiar with the telltale signs of strangulation.

  During those two years at the ranch following the divorce, she tried to focus on self-improvement by watching workout videos, circuit training with five-pound weights in the family room and taking time to glide on her elliptical trainer for twenty minutes every afternoon.

  Each day she would awake by the rooster’s crow. For breakfast she ate two over easy eggs (from her own chickens) on buttered toast, challenging herself to not let a single drip of the thick orange yoke drop on the plate…just for fun. She would scoop up the third fried egg, still warm in the pan, flipping it with the spatula into Pumpkin’s dog bowl. After breakfast the big white Pyrenees would follow her to the stable to feed the horses and chickens. Every morning she would greet her horse Toby with a carrot before their daily horseback ride, where they would head west to the hills beyond the ranch. The horse was a Palomino beauty with warm brown eyes, a golden coat, with a white mane and a matching tail.

  “Toby is of direct lineage to the 1960’s TV horse star Mr. Ed, whose real name was Bamboo Harvester,” Barberella bragged to anyone who ever met the horse.

  Pumpkin had made a bad habit of straying on the rides, breaking his own trails, or getting caught by the scent of wild animal tracks. He would especially run off during the hunting season; the poor dog would go ballistic at the sound of gunshots, so she kept him close to her, and leashed him during the fall. Barberella donned a bright orange hunting vest and a cozy orange beanie covering her long blond hair to help keep safe from the hunter’s bullets. She wrapped the dog’s long lead around the horn of the saddle, with Pumpkin running on her left. They walked and trotted at a slow pace, so to not tire Pumpkin out. She listened to the rhythm of Toby’s hooves clomping against the dry earth. Lifting her face to the sky above, she stretched her neck back to take in the sun’s rays. As she soaked in the warmth, she watched two red-tailed hawks dancing and soaring above the chilly clear blue sky. The three of them were having such a good time. She felt content in the moment. Sucking up the cool day like an ice pop, after the sweltering Texas summer.

  She decided to take the long way returning home. The trail had been worn down from their habitual rides. It looped around a recently mowed alfalfa pasture, and then trailed along a rocky outcropping. Ten minutes later, the rocky area opened to an abandoned field that had returned to its former grassland; with desert patches of prickly pear cactus and large agave plants, the trail disappeared into the tall yellow grass.

  Her horse Toby spotted movement on his right side. She noticed it also. And then she heard the rattle of the snake. The Texas Diamond-Back rattler, nestled in a bed of dry grass, was raising its body to expose its diamond scales, hissing with its split tongue, its body had coiled into a strike position. The horse whinnied and stomped his feet before rearing back; knocking her from the saddle, she landed on her posterior with a thud. The wind escaped her as she struggled to catch her breath.

  “Where’s the snake?” She gasped.

  Her blue eyes were wide open, darting back and forth, making no sudden movement. About ten feet away, she saw the snake slithering through the tall grass, heading away from her. Where was her horse, she wondered, propping herself up to look around?

  “Oh my God…no!” Barberella rasped.

  “Pumpkin!”

  Standing to her feet she began running towards Toby. She could see the horse bucking and whinnying on the far side of the field. She stopped. Gasping for air with her hands on her knees. Bolting forward again, her cowboy boots pounding the dry earth. When she approached him, Toby continued to run and buck wildly, with Pumpkin hanging by a noose around his neck. The dog’s leash connected him, like the Grim Reaper’s umbilical cord, to the frantic horse’s saddle. It took nearly half an hour for her to calm the spooked Palomino.

  Pumpkin was dead. When she pulled his lifeless body from the knot around the saddle horn—she realized she hadn’t fully abandoned hope—at least not until that moment.

  Next to her row, Barberella viewed the bodies piled on top of one another, strewed about bloodied and mauled; a scene straight from a Hitchcock horror film.

  How much Xanax did I take?

  Barberella smacked her face with the palm of her hand.

  “Wake up!” She berated herself over the rumblings of the other passengers.

  She looked across the aisle, one row up, at a petite bird-like woman primped in blue, fluttering about the dead. Her blood-stained yellow dog was running free, trampling over the bodies, making tight circles around the woman, all the time yapping.

  “Excuse me lady?” She called for the little bird’s attention.

  The woman looked up, with tear-stained cheeks, and smiled at her.

  She clapped her hands together and chirped, “You’re alive!”

  Yip…yip…yip!

  Barberella brushed her thinning, long, blond hair between her fingers nervously. She looked two rows back to see the flight attendant was leaning over a bloodied man. His body rested on the floor, under the seats, with his giant cowboy booted legs splayed into the hallway.

  “Hang on Stewart,” the flight attendant called to the man. “Help will be here in just a minute.”

  An older man and a zit-faced teenager from the rear came forward to help pull the drink cart out of the aisleway. Doing their part to help emergency personnel reach the injured. As the heavy metal box was lifted, it revealed the smashed killer dog’s mangled body, entangled with the bloodied flight attendant.

  Up front, a black man’s battered form was stretched across the front of coach. His young daughter was assisting him by soaking up the blood with the blankets she had pulled from the storage space above their seats.

  She watched as a handsome face peeked out from the curtains separating first class to survey the scene. She watched his face drop to disgust, and then horror, before slyly letting the curtain fall back in place.

  “The flight attendant killed the dog,” the little bird tweeted in a singsong voice.

  Barberella felt the plane come to a complete stop. Less than a minute later, she heard the galley maintenance and food delivery doors on both ends opening. She looked out the round windows to see the ground support was using a dolly to lift the paramedics and emergency crews onto the plane. The solo remaining flight attendant immediately directed them to the front of coach, where the most severely wounded needed tending to.

  The paramedics started with the cowboy named Stewart. Several men crawled between the seats in order to maneuver the sizable man from his tight hiding spot on the floor. They were able to roll him onto a stretcher, and then two strong uniformed men quickly carried him out the back of the plane to the waiting ambulance, passing the mortified passengers waiting to deplane. Barberella could see the big man looked jaundiced from his loss of blood, but his quick thinking might have saved him. He had wrapped his leather belt securely around the severed arm to form a tourniquet and slow the blood loss.

  The emergency
team that entered from the first-class galley struggled to break down the wall. It took precious time to remove the food warmer that had been used by the first-class to divide the plane. She heard the luggage tumbling down around them, with emergency crews finally opening the curtains.

  They attempted to revive the concussed flight attendant, so that she could be removed gingerly from the airplane.

  One of the medical team began to assess the injured young woman, clad in knee-high black boots. The paramedic, like a shoe salesman, unzipped the tall black boot to evaluate her injuries. Her thin leg exposed—the outside seemed uninjured—the pain on her face showed the inside to be broken. The paramedic lightly twisted the ankle and she cringed. Then he pulled at her big toe. Her face turned to shock like he had zapped her with buzzer prank.

  Another EMT checked the critically injured dad’s pulse, before several strong uniformed men carried him off on a stretcher. The large man moaned with each jolting step taken by his rescuers. His skinny daughter followed the medical personnel through the curtains, passing through first-class, out the galley exit to the waiting emergency vehicles.

  Additional federal officers and airline workers boarded the plane to help assist passengers to begin the disembarking process via the emergency slides. A swishing sound came from the airplane exit doors opening, and then for several seconds Barberella heard a loud category five hurricane, thundering from the air compressors that blew the emergency slides open.

  “Evacuate, Evacuate, Evacuate,” the captain’s voice came over the speaker.

  “Single file please,” a federal officer yelled to the hectic passengers. “Please remain calm. Hey! Don’t push each other.”