The City in the Middle

This weeks episode is about a young man who loses everything all at once only to discover that sometimes to find a life that you love, you have to start from the beginning. We are going to shoot “The Script” for a YouTube release date of Feb1, 2012. Actors will be chosen from readers. Please visit www.wfiction.com/nextepisode to get your copy of Episode 3, “The Script” and let me know what part you want to play.

Only 5 more days until Episode 2, “Zombie Attack From Outer-Space” goes into the vault and you will only be able to get it by subscribing to www.wfiction.com/nextepisode, but if you do subscribe, you will get all 24 episodes from the Debut Season of “Short Story’s” as well as a paperback copy for Free when the season ends. 

Go to www.wfiction.com/shortstory and share your name and email for your chance to win an XBox 360 Kinetic ready. No purchase necessary, but if you’d like to subscribe to the debut season of “Short Story’s” then I’ll give you an extra entry as a thank you. Please visit www.wfiction.com/nextepisode to subscribe. Drawing will be on December 31, 2011.

Short Story 1 “The Pilot”

If you were to separate and divide by two the number of time that we have left together it would be less than three pages. That was a fact that James had to consider before he went any further. Three pages times two isn’t much, but in a world full of arrows, James knew it only took one direct hit to fix a mess, and without a doubt he had found himself in the middle of a full blown quagmire. Fighting it would not have made any difference. The only thing James could do was accept his fate, finish the story and pray like a mad man.

The time would come when nothing else mattered, but for now that was the furthest thing from the truth. Everything else mattered. The kids, the wife, the mortgage, the car note, being late for work, being too early for work, flying the plane, landing the plane, NOT CRASHING the plane, and to top it all off, James was in charge of bringing the beer for tonight’s bye weekly Bible study. It was something he grew to love once, a long time ago, but now it was nothing more than a constant interruption in his already interrupted life. 

In the back of James’ mind you would find everything you could expect from the attic of a man who was once a child. As he flew through the clouds with 100 or so strangers strapped to the back of his shoulders in the form of slightly anxious, low budget, airline passengers he often found himself asking, “Why?” Not a “Why?” in a general sense, but a “Why?” in a whole hearted attempt to reconfigure the specific circumstances which brought him to be sitting in this very cockpit this exact moment, just before the plain crashes. 

He was trying to work his way back to the beginning, but for what? Could he go back again? Could he rearrange it all? Was anything ever going to be different? Probably not, but still he asked. 

James’ mind was filled with everything, but anything he could use. Instead of concentrating on altitudes and course corrections, he focused on the small inconsequential details of his every day life. Those small little decisions which don’t really matter amounted to almost 100% of his daily routine. What type of beer would he bring to his bye weekly Bible study tonight? Would it be Budweiser or La Fin du Monde? He preferred La Fin Du Monde, but he knew he would buy Budweiser. It was the type of sacrifice that would weigh on any man, much less a professional airline pilot who typically preferred to be uninterrupted during this length of flight, but like the Budweiser which would end up in his shopping cart later today, there was a knock on the cockpit door which disturbed his desires once again. 

James looked over toward the co-pilot with a look of supercilious irritation as he reached up, above most of the buttons, pulleys, and blinking lights to switch on the intercom. “This is Captain James. How can I help you?” The voice that came back from the other end of the speaker spoke and her cheery voice bubbled through the copper wiring and as it blurted out into James’ face like a splash of water after an unsettling dream. 

“Yes, hello Captain James, I have a little girl out here who would just love to come in and check out the cockpit.” As she spoke, you could just hear her blond hair, but she continued to plead her case. “She said she’d be really good and she said she wants to be a pilot when she grows up…and” Then, from the background, on the other side of the cockpit door came a little girls voice, and it crashed into Captain James’ world whether he was ready for it or not.  It was a reminder to the stewardess. “Oh, miss, please don’t forget to tell the Captain that this is my first plane ride!”  “Oh, I won’t” The flight attendant’s voice came back through. “So, can we come in Captain James?” 

Captain James checked the monitor and it was clear. The stewardess was really with a little girl. She couldn’t have been older than he was when he first visited his first cockpit, but times had changed everywhere especially in the sky. “I’m sorry you know we can’t do that kind of thing anymore…” Captain James said regretfully. “Regulations… You understand.” He concluded as a way to help him past and get back to his regular, run of the mill, everyday distractions like flying a commercial aircraft.  

The girl on the other end on the monitor deflated right in front of Captain James, but it didn’t break his heart like it used too. The sting of his first rejection still seared his memory as a pain which had only subsided to numbness as he vividly remembered the first time he had to reject the future of the industry. It was a war he couldn’t win, but he continued to jump on bombs regularly to the point where now he had reached the ability to dash a child’s hopes easily without reservation, resignation, or concern. 

These days Captain James looked at turning people away as a gift. It would only be a matter of time before machines would fly the planes as they were piloted by some pimple-faced video game nerd 1,000 miles away. To be a Pilot was losing its luster in today’s world, so James did his best to keep the children of the future from making a big mistake. Sure they could be pilots, but they would never experience the sensation of being 35,000 feet off the ground and traveling at 700 Miles Per Hour. They would only experience the sensation of staring into a screen from some cold room with warehouse lighting. The future of the airline industry was caged in that office building high above some city street. Yep, in a few short years the romance would have ended and flying would become completely mundane. Better to hurt these kids now, when their children. The industry had become one huge horrible endeavor which he no longer wished for or on anyone, but that wasn’t always the case. 

Long ago, when Captain James was a boy, back when he first started, it was a freeing experience to ride on a cloud from one place to another and for a time James was happy. He would go out of his way to brag at parties about his profession. He played with his children and for a time, he had the most amazing sex you could ever imagine with a wife whose beauty was legendary, but today, this afternoon Captain James did his best to stay away from all three. 

Sometimes he would deliberately and routinely delay a flight while in the air. How? Any way he could. At times he would radio the tower to inform the sleeping air traffic controller that one gauge or another wasn’t working properly, or if he felt so bold he would complain that the plane had an unruly passenger and had to redirect to a closer city, but then when they landed, the crew had always gotten the passenger to calm down. 

The situation was always under control by the time the plane landed and Captain James never felt comfortable divulging the passengers’ name as a matter of principle. After all, it was usually either an elderly woman or a young child, and an emergency involving either an elderly woman or a young child could always be handle discreetly, but today was different. 

Today’s emergency wasn’t due to a pretend situation caused by an old woman or little kid; today’s situation was for real. It was the kind of “for real” situation which springs from the wells of nowhere. Like a lightning bolt, this lightning bolt came from out of a sunny sky and crashed into Captain James’ plane immediately immersing everyone involved in a situation as serious as a plane falling out of the sky. 

Suddenly everything that once was, wasn’t. For once Captain James’ gauges were not working properly. This time, he did have unruly passengers, but not because they were unhappy with the on in-flight movie, or the kosher meal, or unwarranted delay, but because they knew that they too were going down. 

It was the force of gravity that pulled the air out of the lungs of the 100 or so passengers as they plunged downwards towards the Mid-West at a rate which would make terminal velocity blush. 35,000 feet turned into 25,000 feet, and then as quickly as that happened, 25,000 feet turned into 15,000 feet. They were doomed in their collective demise, and when there was nothing anyone including Captain James could do, everyone let go and just before everything ended, Captain James pulled his book out from under his seat, forgot about the beer, and read until it all ended.