DeadHead
The seat beside him was supposed to be empty.
The man in the pilot’s uniform took the empty seat beside me just as they closed the cabin door, and for one impossible second I thought he was the person I had killed.
Not because of his face.
His face was wrong. Too narrow. Too pale. Clean-shaven where Gordon had worn a short beard to hide the scar under his chin. The man beside me had no scar, no beard, no blood on his shirt, no look of surprise frozen forever in the dark pupils of his eyes.
But he had Gordon’s stillness.
That was what made my hands tighten on the armrests. The same awful quiet. The same way of occupying space as if the world had already happened and he was merely waiting for the rest of us to catch up.
He placed a black leather flight bag under the seat in front of him, buckled his belt, and turned to me with a small, tired smile.
“Sorry,” he said. “Almost missed it.”
I nodded because nodding was easier than speaking. My mouth had gone dry the moment he sat down.
Outside the oval window, rain slipped in bright threads down the glass. Blue runway lights blurred and trembled in the dark. Somewhere beneath my feet, engines groaned awake, deep and animal, and the plane gave a little shudder.
The man looked past me toward the window.
“Bad night to fly,” he said.
I forced myself to breathe.
“Are you flying the plane?”
He smiled again, but this time it seemed to arrive a second too late.
“Not this one.”
His uniform was dark navy, almost black in the cabin light. Four silver stripes on the sleeves. Wings pinned above the breast pocket. He looked like every pilot I had ever seen coming through terminals with coffee in one hand and the secret knowledge of weather in the other.
And still, for half a second, some ugly little part of me wondered how he had gotten there.
Not into the seat.
Into the uniform.
The thought came and went so quickly I almost missed it. But he didn’t. I knew he didn’t. His eyes shifted toward me, calm and dark and unreadable, and I felt suddenly exposed, as if the cabin lights had brightened just over my row.
I looked away first.
There was something wrong with him.
Maybe it was the rain.
Maybe it was the fact that no one had checked his ticket.
Maybe it was because the seat beside me had been empty all through boarding. I had watched it, prayed over it, guarded it like a miracle. No one beside me meant no questions. No accidental touches. No one noticing the mud on my cuffs or the bandage wrapped too tightly around my left hand.
No one leaning close enough to smell the smoke in my coat.
“I’m deadheading,” he said.
Read the rest of the story on Medium
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After Dinner Conversation®
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