micro-fiction friday : nov 29, 2024

cw: blood, violence, viscera, child endangerment.

I was a flight attendant for years.  Almost a decade. It wasn’t a job I thought I’d ever give up. Anyone who works in the airline industry will tell you: it’s shitty pay, and shitty hours and we do it because it’s who we are. Once you start flying, giving it up to go back to an office job is unimaginable.  Or it was.

I loved flying.  I was one of the rare few that actually liked talking with passengers.  Meeting new people and hearing about where we were taking them.  Grandparents meeting the new baby for the first time, another taking their first vacation in years, finally checking off their bucket list item to swim in the Pacific Ocean.  Hundreds of stories, hundreds of people every day. Not all of the stories I heard were happy ones, but I treasured them all equally.

Of course there are the downsides: every night a different city where mostly all you see is the same wall art you looked at in the last city. It’s not as glamorous as everyone thinks.  For every Paris layover there’s seventeen backwater townships so small that you wonder how there’s even an airport there at all. There’s the isolation as well. A new coworker every shift, sometimes a few times a day even.  There’s no real sense of camaraderie between coworkers. It’s easy for it to become a hollow life.

That’s why I was so excited to pick up a shift to work with my old classmate, Jenna.  I’d met her in initial training class. It’s kind of like flight attendant boot-camp; we’d spent nine weeks studying, doing drills, quizzing each other: over time the class gets pretty close. Since there are so many flight attendants on the line, it’s always rare to work with anyone from your “initial” but when you did get that chance, it was always a great time.

On descent of the first flight of our four-day shift, Jenna looked at me with concern.  She had a head-cold.  Not something you’d have to call in sick for in an office job, but with the changes in cabin pressure, burst eardrums were not uncommon in the industry. I convinced her not to book off in Chicago. It was selfish, but it was a short flight back to Montreal.  Besides, she might get stuck in Chicago for days, and our airport hotel there wasn’t even that nice.  I offered her some decongestants and she agreed to tough it out.

The flight from Chicago to Montreal is just shy of two and a half hours. As we ascended, I felt Jenna shifting uncomfortably beside me on the jump-seat bench. As I looked over I saw her popping her mouth open wide, before closing it again, in an attempt to clear some of the pressure. Normally as flight attendants, you don’t feel it, or rather: it’s not pain, but pressure, it dissipates immediately.  To see Jenna doing a goldfish impression for most of takeoff, I started to get pretty worried. It was when we were setting up for service that her ears finally pressurized, and we both let out a sigh of relief.  I hoped it was the decongestants finally kicking in.

This passenger manifest for that flight was, honestly, underwhelming. It was a Wednesday afternoon, so plenty of business professionals travelling for work. One blew his nose incessantly, and kept trying to hand me his tissues. I hoped the smile masked my obvious disgust.  Did people forget about wearing masks on planes?  Then it was a smattering of families, university students, and those who knew that flying a random Wednesday afternoon was just about the cheapest the flight could be. There were a couple babies, the one in my section was travelling with her sister, a kindergarten-age girl with cheeks as round as apples and a big, gap-toothed smile. She told me her name was Marie, and she was five.  She also showed me on her fingers, in case I didn’t know how many five was. I made sure to give her a little airplane sticker and sneak her an extra cookie.

Nous atterrions bientôt à Montreal, we will be landing shortly into Montreal.  Veuillez ranger tous vos effets personnels et…

The purser’s announcement rang through the cabin. An announcement I’d heard a thousand times, we’d be arriving shortly, put everything away, stop trying to hand me your garbage.  It was all routine.  Until it wasn’t anymore.

It started quickly. I’ll try and recount it exactly as I remember it, but it was all over in less than ten minutes.  Ten minutes and nearly a hundred dead, before the wheels even touched the ground. It started with a child up front. A mom screaming. The cabin manager rushing over before running back to the forward galley. I heard afterwards from one of the survivors that the cabin manager saw the gaping raw wound on the mother’s arm from where she tried to keep the child in the seat.  The child, who’s hands were pinned resorted to other methods to negotiate their freedom. The purser was named Angela.  She had a bit of a stick up her ass, but she was friendly enough. The plane tipped its nose down, starting descent, and it seemed like the cabin followed.  Off-kilter, we steeply headed down.

Passengers (we were supposed to call them patrons) began rising from their seats, slowly at first, but then entire rows were standing. They all started to shake, first their heads, then their whole bodies, like the entire cabin was having a seizure.  But they were all standing in place. Then their heads starting whipping around left to right, and they eyes surveyed the cabin with animalistic precision. Soon they began ripping armrests off the aircraft, holding laptops high, finding or sourcing anything heavy or blunt or sharp.  

For a moment, I watched, wondering absently why knitting needles were allowed on board in the first place, before the carafe came down onto my head and Jenna was on top of me.  I have to remind myself that it wasn’t Jenna. It wasn’t her. It didn’t even really look like her; those eyes weren’t Jenna’s, they were barely human. That’s not how I want to remember her. Her incisors sparkled in the fluorescent light, dripping with saliva, as she plunged down towards my neck. My hand flew up defensively and her mouth caught it, ripping flesh and fingers off mercilessly.

“Jenna, oh my god–“

Andrew grabbed Jenna’s arm, pulling her off of me.  Immediately she turned her attention to him, and in a moment, her teeth were embedded in his neck. My hand reached out instinctively to help him.  Blood gushed from three stubs where fingers used to be.  As I turned to call for help, I saw the cabin in a similar state.  Carnage. Bloodlust. Complete ego death.

I heard Andrew’s body hit the ground, as Jenna turned to look at me.  He convulsed a little, gargling.  We made eye contact.  Selfishly, I hope he understood why I had to turn away.  

Jenna dove for me, as I whipped the lavatory door open.  My Oxford came off in her hands as I ripped my foot away and slammed the door.

Jenna’s howl was followed by a thud, thud, thud, against the door. It shook against its hinges with each impact and I realized she must have been throwing the whole weight of her petite body against the door trying to break it down. It continued for a while until I heard another impact, farther away.  And then Jenna’s howls turned to a whimper.  Another thud, and the whimpering stopped. I held my breath, waiting, hoping whoever–whatever intervened might still be ignorant of my presence.

Then I heard it.  

A whisper. It wasn’t coming from outside the door, it was inside my head.  A language I had never heard, couldn’t understand.  It was a voice speaking but it lulled like the sweetest honey music.  I was no longer aware of myself, of where I was, all I could hear was the voice. I couldn’t even call it a reprieve  from whatever was happening outside.  There was no outside, there was no moment before. The voice, the moment existed in a vacuum.

And then the pressure in my ears released, and I stumbled back, collapsing to the floor, as I grieved what I had just lost.  I wanted the voice to come back, to tell me more, to take me away from here.
The tears came fast and hot as the world re-contextualized around me.

There was a renewed thud, thud, thud against the door. This time it was heavier. Someone bigger was trying to cave in the door, and the door strained against the weight.  

This is about when I started to scream. At this point, I’d well and truly come to grips with my cover being blown. Even if I was still attempting to hide, I’m not sure I could’ve held the screaming in. I was, what could generously be called, catatonic. Coming back to reality, the overwhelm was immense. Everything that you take years to learn as a child: who you are, what a person is, what life and death is, what it all means: it felt like being run over by a steamroller of pure informational overload.

So I spent a couple minutes screaming to the soundtrack of the thud, against the door. Then suddenly, the battering stopped, and I became aware of the screams from outside the lavatory. The first few cut off abruptly, but then there were more and more.  These weren’t the howls from before, of animals, these were the screams of people, humans, patrons, even.

“Help me hold her down!” A man called out, “Hold her arms down, goddammit, help me!”

The screams were transforming into sobs. The cabin was beginning to quiet down significantly.  It was the sound of a little girl crying that got me to open the door.

I walked past the two men in the aisle pinning someone down to a seat as she snapped her jaws at them. I walked through the blood that soaked through the floor of the cabin. I stepped over the bodies strewn about.  I sat on the floor of the aisle next to the little girl, and then I picked her up and put her in my lap.  Her mouth was slick with blood, and I held her tight to me before wiping it off with the sleeve of my blazer.

“It’s gonna be okay, honey.  It’ll be alright.”

It took the wheels touching down for me to snap out of the daze, when the nine-weeks of flight attendant boot-camp finally snapped back to me. I realized that the pilots probably had no idea what had happened.

I sprinted to the phone as soon as we turned off the runway and told them to send anyone and everyone, all emergency personnel available. Call the god damn cavalry.  I hadn’t had time to assess the cabin, I couldn’t even really tell them what had happened beyond that there were dozens dead and practically everyone else injured.  The blood from where my fingers used to be were soaking into Marie’s shirt as she rested on my hip.

Next was fetching the first aid kit, and restraining the few who still hadn’t snapped out of it.  Thankfully the EMS came soon after to fix my botched attempts to stop all the bleeding.

Eighty-eight casualties. Plus an additional six after the incident: either dead on arrival or a few days later in the ICU.  The thirty-six remaining passengers had varied injuries.  None of us made it out unscathed.

I was the only surviving Cabin Crew Member.

Through the first wave of emergency personnel, Marie and I stayed together. Neither of us were in critical condition, so we were low priority. As we clung to each other, it was unclear if I was her safety blanket or if she was mine.

Marie’s mom was one of the ones that was initially restrained.  She didn’t snap out of her trance until well after we’d landed. Someone had put her baby in the overhead bin. Whoever it was saved that baby’s life. They were dead now.

Marie’s grandparents came to pick her, her mother, and baby brother up from the hospital the next day. I gave Marie’s mother my phone number. I told her to call me if she needed anything.  She just shook her head, eyeing me strangely.

The next few days were a blur. A million questions. From police. From the airline. From the news. From the person in the mirror, when I was able to look at them.

It feels horrible to say, but watching the plane unfold into chaos was only the second worst thing that happened that day.  I don’t know for how long I heard that voice in my head, but losing it was… inexpressible.  Devastating. It wasn’t the words that were beautiful, but all the hardships, every ache or twinge or embarrassment I had known: gone.  Feelings I didn’t even know that I’d felt simply melted as that liquid honey sound coursed through me.  It was the only time I understood the concept of peace.

I wish I could tell you what the voice had said to me, but it feels fuzzy around the edges, like something I’m not supposed to remember. Even if I could remember, I’m not sure that I would repeat the words here.  I’m afraid of the power they held over me.  I’m afraid of what I might turn into. More than that, I’m afraid of what they might do to you.