ALTHOUGH SCHEDULED to depart that Sunday morning at 7:50, the passengers of Flight 1155 were not permitted to board the aircraft until 10:25, and since all had complied with the new security protocols at considerable inconvenience, arriving at the airport at least one hour ahead of the flight’s scheduled departure, the collective mood as they crowded the jetway could be described rather generously as irritable.
Even without the repeated boarding delays many of them felt jangled. Repeated alternations of rush and arrest, after all, are intrinsically at odds with the very concept of an airport terminal, which is not a destination but a distribution mechanism designed to speed streams of travellers to idling planes and then hurl them into the sky. Among these passengers were many who could cite a relatively recent past when they had moved through the world with ease and dispatch, who prided themselves on arriving at the airport not a scant moment before it was absolutely necessary. They could change planes with aplomb back then, save hours or circumvent delays with a few words of instruction whispered into their PDAs.
But the high-ceilinged corridors and broad concourse-intersections originally designed to facilitate swift flows of humanity were now employed to corral those same humans into milling queues along worm-trails fashioned from stanchions and cables, and the dissonance provoked by this contradiction had a noticeable effect on even the most compliant of the passengers, inducing a perceptibly querulous sensitivity.
Consequently at least a third of the flight’s passengers entirely disregarded the
…
Bill Teitelbaum studies writing at the Kitchen Table College of Continuing Education in Lincolnwood, Illinois, a small Midwestern village adjacent to Chicago. His work has appeared in journals such as Bayou, Confrontation, The MacGuffin and Tampa Review, and can be found, if you look hard enough, in anthologies such as Western Michigan University’s Art of the One-Act. Bill’s short story, “Grounded,” is part of a recently completed collection called Are You Seeing Anyone?, tales of our disenchanted culture’s wayward pursuit of happiness.