Jenny lets him share the table with her. There’s a table in the far corner, but she hates to be rude.

Someone behind her bumps her elbow. She looks, but then they’re gone. Just another body in the throng.

The man – golden hair, a dimpled chin, a white button-down shirt with the fabric pilling on the collar – licks his teeth and lifts a finger for a waitress.

“What are you drinking?” he asks over the noise.

Jenny holds aloft her own glass – a mostly drained Merlot. She says it aloud, just in case.

Waitress comes. Takes the orders. He asks for a gin-and-tonic. All around, the crowds thicken and tighten like a belt, like a pair of hands. She hates this place. Airports smell like airplanes. Ozone and cleaning spray and old perfume and coffee stains. Here, the added bonus of the tang of wine and gin and slushie nuclear neon margaritas (which she knows aren’t margaritas, but she loves them just the same).

“Where you flying?” he asks.

“Dallas,” she says.

He nods, like he knows. “Me too, me too.”

He’s got a dark blot on his blue tie. Looks purple.

“You’re very handsome,” he says, an odd choice of words, but there it is. “Pretty eyes.”

The waitress brings their drinks, hurries off. Jenny hoists the glass and takes a sip, and decides right away to stick the needle in his balloon. “I’m married.”

“No kidding.” He says it like he knew it. He already saw her ring, she figures. Just in case, she waggles that finger around her glass. The ring tinks against it.

She shrugs. “Sorry to disappoint.”

He waves it off. “I’m married, too.”

“Oh. Oh, good. I just thought — congrats.”

“What’s your name?”

“Jenny. Jenny Slater.”

The man’s mouth opens, agape. “Hey, Jenny Slater. That’s crazy. My name’s Paul Slater.”

“That’s my husband’s name.” Something feels off, now. Something she can’t identify. Like a knick-knack on a shelf moved away from the others, like a painting replaced in the night.

“I know,” he says, and smiles, and licks his teeth again. “I’m your husband, silly girl.”

“That’s not funny.” Already she’s looking around. Is this a joke? Where’s Paul? Is he here? She looks for police. An air marshal. Somebody. Anybody.

He raises his voice to match the volume of the crowd. “I don’t mean it to be funny, babe.”

The man slides across the table a driver’s license, and taps it against the bottom of her glass. It’s her husband’s license. She’d know it anywhere, because the corner was chewed up – teeth marks from their unruly terrier.

But two things, two things were different.

First, the picture. It wasn’t her husband. It was this man. With the golden hair and the dimple chin.

Second, on the corner opposite of the teeth marks – a rusty spot. A dried circle of weathered red.

Jenny feels dizzy. Her world, whirling. Her guts drop, like she’s already on the flight taking off, ascending, leaving an old place and going to a new one. A destination she didn’t choose. She’s motion sick. Again she looks around, she raises a hand, but nobody sees it. The ground is gone beneath her.

“We’re going to Dallas together,” the man says, chuckling. “A couple’s time away. From the kids! From little Becky and littler Melissa. It sounds so nice.”

He puts his hand over hers. His fingers are callused. The nails, chewed and ragged.

“The kids,” she says, the words barely loud enough. “My children.”

“They’re fine.” He tightens his hand. The calluses bite. Hangnails scratch. “And they’ll continue to be fine, because Daddy loves them very much, and Mommy loves Daddy. And that makes it all okay.”

Outside the bar, the announcement: flight’s boarding. Her flight. Their flight. To Dallas.

“Ready?” he asks.

“I don’t – what’s happening –“ She feels tears moving down her cheeks.

“Time to fly, babe.”

She’s taken away. She leaves the table, leaves the airport bar. With him. Her mouth is dry. Her nose filled with the airport stink. Everything feels loose, unmoored, flying high and getting higher.

The man winks. Smiles. Licks his teeth. And pulls her toward the gate, ticket in hand.

…

For the Crash And Burn Steve Weddle Memorial Airport Flash Fiction.

The book is real. His notes sketched into margins, equal signs and question marks. But what I take out of this book isn’t what the technical writers put into it. I don’t think like a pilot thinks. When I see that there are two main kinds of drag, I assume we’re speaking metaphorically.

So Manual of Flight is a symbolic book to me. An educational work, a foreign text, for sure, but as much about personal momentum as airspeed, and more about drag than drag. The only way I know how to communicate that is to change the context of the words until they’re weird for you, too. I hope.

This is the final poem in this series.

Parasite Drag

Reduced pressure equals increased lift.
Parasite drag increases with airspeed.

Work your empennage.
Work your elevators.

Positive static is stability tending
toward your original equilibrium.

Negative static? The ball’s displaced
and moving farther from equilibrium.

You yaw in the direction of the lowered aileron.
Call it adverse yaw. Call it.

To measure your true course, center
over an intersection.

The course line crosses the azimuth in
the direction of flight.

Increase your airspeed and the parasite
drag increases, too.

I say again: negative, out, over.
Read back.

Roger. Say again. Speak slower.
Stand by.

That is correct: verify.
Check with originator.

© 2009 Will Hindmarch

From a series of found poems drawn from my father’s copy of Cessna’s Manual of Flight.

The wind side of the computer
determines the altitude which results
in the highest groundspeed, as they say.

This is accomplished
by comparing the winds
aloft with the course.

The wind forecasts each altitude
on the rotating azimuth
like a groundspeed/true heading problem.

The true heading problem — the difference
is that more than one wind is plotted
and each wind dot is identified.

The plotter portion of the sliding grid is used
to measure true course. You can think
of it as a device that measures directions.

The following instructions explain
how to determine your true course.

© 2009 Will Hindmarch

This is part of a series of found poems drawn from the Cessna Manual of Flight, which I got from my father.

Once you establish the bank, relax.
The pressure on the ailerons and rudder
pedals? Neutralize them.

Not all of the lift is available
to overcome weight.
You’ll tend to descend.

It’s a shallow spiral.

Roll out
before the desired heading
or you’ll overshoot.

—

© 2009 Will Hindmarch.

This is the second found poem in a series from my dad’s old copy of Cessna’s Manual of Flight.

This increases drag.
This decreases airspeed.
Steeper turns you must add,
power to overcome,
the drag.

Or you’re faced with the choice:
lose altitude or airspeed after you
roll out, of your turn,
reset power
for cruise
so you can fly
hands off.

© 2009 Will Hindmarch

(So I found this Cessna pilot’s guide, called Manual of Flight, in with my father’s books. The thing is full of found-poetry fodder. One of the best reactions I’ve ever gotten to a poem came from an early version of this one, which I’ve just rewritten after losing the original years ago. All this week, I’m composing found poems from this Manual of Flight.)

“Why is that?”

“I’ll tell you,” he says with that used-car-salesman tone that implies the word if is on its way. “But,” dammit, “you can’t tell Hodge I told you.”

“Okay,” I say. No point in telling him Hodge was dragged to death behind a very-much-earthbound car yesterday.

“Okay. Here it is: flying cars are easy sells because nothing ever goes wrong with them. Absolutely no practical downside to owning one of them.” He smiles, all upper teeth. “Dream come true.”

“Except. For the, you know,” I let it hang there for a second, but he doesn’t see it, “fact it’s not true.” He squinted and shrugged, then went for his coffee. “The part where they don’t exist.”

He slurped off the top of his mug. Under the table, I push the recorder closer to him. “Well, like it says on the brochure, we sold a dream. An experience.”

“No,” I correct him, finger pointing up between us, “you told them they could take these cars home.”

“And McDonald’s tells people that a clown loves them.”

“How can you say that?” the Doctor asks. Behind his glasses his eyes are red and swollen.

“I cannot”—the cylinders catch and hiccup—”love, love you.” The Doctor reached out to her with his good hand and brushed her porcelain face. “I cannot—not, not—love you,” she said again.

Mortimer spoke up. “I’m sorry, Doctor.” He pulled a phonographic record, black and grooved, from the front of his apron. “Do you want try number 221?”

The Doctor put his plush-and-fabric hand to his eyes, scrubbed away tears. “I don’t know how many more of these I can handle today,” he said, taking the record and swapping it with the one on the back of her brass skull. He cranked up her insides, like the weights inside a grandfather clock, and fitted the needle against the new record.

“Good morning, my dear,” he said.

“Good morning, my love.”

Slow night. Snow and sleet came down like slushy piss. The bar was empty but for him and her. But this is where Jonny Stoops found himself, night after night, no matter the weather.

It wasn’t for the drinks. It was for her.

“It’s on the house,” Miranda said.

She slid a highball glass toward him. The liquid within was brown, but not the amber-brown of a good scotch. This was mud brown. Grossly turbid. Like stirred-up pondwater.

Though, it did smell sweet.

“That doesn’t look so good,” he said.

She giggled. “Jon –“

“Jonny.”

“Jonny, listen, you come in here every night, all by your little lonesome, and you sit across the bar and you talk to me. If I’m off pouring drinks, you watch me. I’ve been here for three months, and I’ve seen you here every night. You like me. I know you like me.”

“No, c’mon, I’m just a drunk –“

“You’re not a drunk. You barely touch your drinks.”

She was right, but what was he supposed to say? He couldn’t tell her that he was just passing by outside, saw her inside pouring beer from the tap, when something clicked inside of him. His heart thumped like jungle drums, his blood shrieked in his ears, a wild sound. He had to come inside, had to talk to her, had to be near her.

“You’re a sweet guy,” she said. “I like sweet guys. There’s something between us. Something animal.”

“I do like you.”

“So drink the drink, do me that favor. Maybe if you drink it, I’ll give you a little kiss.”

“A little one?”

“Just drink it.”

He narrowed his eyes to slits, imagined kissing her.

His mouth was wet. His pulse stuttered.

“What’s in it?” he asked. It smelled like bananas and something else.

“Not telling. I call it a Radioactive Monkey.”

“Cute.”

“I know.”

Hand curled around the glass, he pictured her naked. Feeding him the drink. Licking his ear. Hot breath. Rough tongue.

He shuddered, then slugged back the drink.

It tasted like cold, runny dogshit mixed with a mouthful of blood.

With a hint of banana.

She reached in and kissed him on his forehead (the lips, the lips! some small part of him shrieked), and then–

•••

He awoke, tied to a bed that was not his own. He was naked, a tangle of sheets cast haphazardly across his thighs.

His erection stood strong and sore. It throbbed; a hammer-struck thumb.

He couldn’t remember a thing.

In the half-darkness, he saw Miranda sitting in the corner on a rocking chair. He heard something move off to his right, but his neck and head hurt. What felt like a hangover hung from his brain like a swaying boat anchor.

Miranda was stroking her belly.

“Your seed took,” she said. She sounded… satisfied.

“Okay,” he said, his voice groggy and slurred. He tried to concentrate, tried to remember, but things just weren’t coming together.

“I’m going to have your baby.”

“I’m not ready to be a father,” was the only thing he could think to say. Did her arms look different? Darker? Her breasts, too, seemed cast in the same shadow. A shadow with lines, with texture.

“No worries, I don’t need you. They don’t need you.”

“Good.” His head was swimming.

“But my other babies do.”

Babies?

Something shuffled, off to his left.

She cooed: “My little monkey babies.”

Shapes began moving, converging at the foot of the bed. At first he saw only two, but more moved out of the periphery and into sight.

Children.

No—his mind railed. Chimpanzees. Or something like them. Chimpanzees weren’t monkeys, were they?

He couldn’t believe he was thinking about this.

Primates, he thought. They’re all primates.

They came into the meager light.

One’s eye hung from the socket on a glistening tendon.

Another had a long tongue, forked; it flicked the air beneath a piggish, thuggish nose and a pair of human eyes.

One climbed onto the bed, using the rope around his foot as a hand-hold. He saw its teeth, sharp and pointed. Lips curled back over yellow fangs.

“They’re hungry,” she said, just as the toothy one clamped its mouth on the inside of Jonny’s thigh. He felt little pain, only numbness, but could feel the warm splash of blood running down and wetting the sheets.

More clambered atop him. Broken monkeys: wild eyes and many limbs.

One bit off his ear.

Then some fingers.

A third–or fifth, or seventh–took a mouthful of his pectoral, sucking the man-breast into its mouth like a whole scoop of ice-cream, the nipple as the cherry.

“Feed, my little radioactive monkeys,” Miranda hissed from across the room. “Feed.”

And as she moved closer, he saw her chest and arms were covered with a dense hair. She grunted something, and in her eyes he saw something wild, something primitive. Something animal.

Then they ate his eyes, and that was the end of that.

“And you still want to keep it?” Kendal’s got him by the wrist joint, one foot on his thigh, and she’s pulling.

“That’s not,” his voice breaks into a shriek as his elbow port disconnects, “funny!” He’s panting. Something drips out of the joint. A bit of conductor fluid, a dab of blood.

“The worm’s in your wrist now, for sure. You’re about ten seconds from losing your shoulder. You want I should wait?”

“No,” he says. “Yes. Wait.” He looks at the ceiling. Yellow tiles, used to be white. He swore he’d never let her do this again. He smells the electric burn of his elbow grinding itself, out of place. If the virus gets into his myokinetic interface, into the flat ribbons under his shoulder muscles, leading to his spine, it could mess with the signals that run from brain to arm in a game of bioelectric telephone. Permanent damage.

And yet.

“Don’t do it,” he says. Almost crying.

“Screw that,” Kendal says, leaning back into it, pushing off his thigh until his arm’s off its threads.