Whiptail

Episode One, Nov 3 2023

These are not my hands. Foreign roads of delicate blue veins chart the back of my left, even as it rests there on the steel shell of my life’s achievement. Once, these hands were hard and calloused, stained with the indelible grease of a lowly mechanic. I glance at the watch that dangles loosely on the wrist. It displays the same time it always has since I smashed it three decades ago, but still, I check. Idleness is a curse.

I try to beat back empty thoughts any way I can. Vonnegut’s new novel Slaughterhouse Five sits finished on the empty seat beside me. I ploughed through it voraciously, starting and finishing in one go between here and the station at Forty-Nine. I’m drawn to Billy Pilgrim like a lost relative. Him and me, stuck in time. But if someone asks me I’ll have to label the book as drivel—dangerous stuff when you’re in the public eye, and people are so sensitive these days. 

I look again at my face on the cover of The Trans Continental, superimposed over an image of the bullet-shaped shuttle with the signature bulge at the front end. “DESIGN MAVEN OF THE NEW WORLD”. Some bits about the maiden voyage and opening up long-lost shipping routes, etcetera. The picture does me no favours. 

The man across the aisle has been staring at me for an hour. He probably recognizes me from the paper but I’m in no mood for socializing. In fact, I’m exhausted. In fact, I’m always exhausted. It’s the curse of driven people. 

I run my fingers repeatedly over the smooth rivets that ring the porthole beside me. In First Class we’ve got an unspoiled view of the sprawling, lifeless tundra speeding past. Nothing to see for four hundred miles in any direction, but somehow comforting in the isolation, depending on the time of day. The coach sections farther back will be obscured in a milky plume of yellow dust in the midday sun. If anything out there was still alive to see or hear, we’d be quite the commotion—an unnatural break in the stillness. 

The powerful hum of the steam turbines up top translates through the hull to my fingers. It makes me swell a bit, to be honest. Unaffected by the dry environment, the high altitude. My babies. The crowning achievement of my career. And the only good thing to come out of the war after so much waste of life and resources. 

The man is still staring, boring holes into me. He gives me the creeps. I glanced at him earlier, acknowledged him with a cold upward nod, hoping he’d take the hint. But his face… his face sent a chill through me. Horribly gnarled and disfigured, most likely a burn, I think. I guess him to be about my age, so probably a war injury. I’m positive the out-of-fashion Homburg hat he wears is there to disguise more scars. Still, doesn’t give him the right to be rude. 

“A cocktail for you, Miss Barlow?” I smile at the steward and point at a selection on the proffered menu card. She moves on. I wait for her to address the disfigured man, hoping to hear his voice. Despite my displeasure of being gawked at, something about him makes me curious. 

She moves past him without stopping. Did she forget? Perhaps when she passes by on her way back to the food car. But she passes by him for a second time without acknowledgement. I wonder if he’s given instructions to be left undisturbed. 

He’s still staring. I lean forward in my seat and force myself to look directly at him. “Excuse me, did the steward just forget you?” His eyes are as lifeless as the rolling desert outside. Silence. A bead of sweat tickles my back between the shoulder blades, despite climate control. “Do I know you?” 

“I know you.” The voice seems to come out of the air behind me, an echo without a primary source. The dead eyes look through me as though I am the echo. My stomach turns to ice. I didn’t see his mouth move. 

“No,” I hear myself say, like a distant protest. “No you don’t.” I want to look away but I can’t—I’m hopelessly drawn in, like a moth to flame. It’s happening again. The porthole behind the stranger begins to  jump erratically; larger, smaller, now elongated, stretched out of proportion. I see it through him, as if he is a half-solid thing. He smiles. He knows. 

Through the distorted opening I see a flash of yellow and red, a cloud of dust. I hear the mesmerizing thrum of powerful rotary Wasp engines reaching for me. It’s too late.

I’m going back, and this man is the trigger.