An excerpt from the website, “Randall Writes About Ghosts” by Randall Tinsley, August 10, 2010

To be fair, it wasn’t the airline’s fault. 

I’m writing this from 37,000 feet, three hours and forty-seven minutes east off the coast of Boston, according to the monitor in the seatback in front of me. I departed from Chicago on another airplane that wasn’t haunted. My connecting flight, Delta 4782, that I’m currently traversing like a tourist in a haunted amusement park, is a curious experience. My ticket and the monitor claim my destination is London. You could scratch that off and replace it with hell and be just as accurate. 

I’m curled into 33E, an aisle seat, with my headphones snug over my ears like earmuffs. The blanket over my lap is red and thin as crepe paper, hardly useful against the frigid temps inside the cabin. My fellow passengers appear comfortable with or without blankets. Some brought their own thicker blankets. One blanket is emblazoned with a cartoon beaver, another with the Pittsburgh Steelers logo, and yet another with what is unmistakably the Circle K insignia. Before I log back into the wifi, I resist the temptation to go down a rabbit hole researching gas station blankets.

Others on the plane brought neck pillows. I see several children, two of them siblings, with matching squishy stuffed animals the size of watermelons that they are now using as pillows propped against their mother’s shoulders. She appears neither bothered nor excited by this development. She simply is a–the–prop in their life. She has smiled in her sleep five times now, for what it’s worth. 

I, on the other hand, am shivering.

It’s a medium-sized plane with three seats in the middle and two two-seaters on either side. The middle seat to my left is empty, thank the lord, thanks to some crafty maneuvering on the flight app beforehand. I shifted seats four times until I secured an aisle with an empty seat next to it. The gentleman on the aisle opposite the empty seat gave me a fist bump when the flight attendant announced the boarding doors were closed and the seat between us was unoccupied. 

It’s the little things in life.

I say thank the lord not because of the additional leg and elbow room or the extra storage space under the middle seat in front of us. I say it because I can clutch the armrest to my left every time the ghost floats by making that godforsaken clucking noise. 

I’ll get to the ghost in due time, but first need to address a few items. 

You may be wondering: Why this flight? What happened? Who died?

I do my best to avoid hypotheticals. Like any human, I can get caught up in projections and what-ifs. I’m not immune. When it comes to my work, however, I want to know the facts because I want to share what really happened with you all. I am not good at fiction. I struggle to make up enough details to fit a narrative that I would be proud of. That’s why I report on my experiences with what I am led to believe via phone call, email, or podcast, with people who have either witnessed the ghosts personally or are close enough to someone who has, that I can take their account as true enough. I’ll do the excavating.

My reactions to the experience are predicated on the authenticity of the dead.

I’ve stayed in three places overnight where nothing happened. The articles are shorter and saved in a folder marked unproven on my computer. I can’t guarantee they are not haunted. I can only confirm my experience sleeping there yielded no temperature change or plane shift. I did not see or feel any spectors.

Unlike the lady on this airplane.

The gentleman sharing the open middle seat with me is named Carter. He is of average height, which I find difficult to determine with the plane’s low ceiling. He’s a skinny man wearing short shorts with an inseam no longer than five inches. The shorts have a snug zipper pocket on one hip, for a slim wallet or key ring. When he stood after the flight attendants brought the food and drink carts out to the front, I confirmed he had a wallet zipped into the pocket. When he returned from the bathroom, I also confirmed what I thought’d I’d seen on his legs, which were a constellation of small bruises around his knees and thighs. There were more down his calves, but the concentration was around his knees. 

The dinner options were chicken, pasta, or vegetarian, should that option make it back to us (it didn’t; not that I planned on choosing it). I chose the chicken and rice with a spicy sauce, a roll, butter, two slices of cheese, and a chocolate mousse. I don’t pretend that airplane meals are examples of fine cuisine, nor do I tell friends or family after a flight how bad the food was by throwing my hands about and suggesting they never liked the airline anyway. 

A woman seated behind one row and to my right, across the aisle, scoffed, “American is so much better. Or Lufthansa! Have you flown them? High class treatment no matter where you sit. And that’s the problem with airline travel these days, you never know who to trust.” 

I ate my chicken and sopped the spicy sauce with the roll. The chocolate mousse I intermixed with sips from red wine. I’m a slow eater. I prefer to pace myself. The red wine I drank at intervals that fit the time the male attendant made with the trash cart, and then the drink cart behind it. Finish the wine right as he showed up to take the bottle and food trash away. Ask for another when the drink cart comes. Depending on how events unfold, pop to the back for a bathroom break and a polite request for a final bottle of red “to help me fall asleep.” 

I considered the investment I was making, having purchased the international flight from my own diminishing funds. This is not a pitch to magazines to give me a shot. Contract me for an article and pay a flat rate plus expenses. It’s a recollection. That recollection had me head buzzed from the first wine, full and happy from the food, wondering if it was worth the $456.

The traffic on the site after the old man in the bowling alley jumped after a Twitter post went, not viral, but had a slight cold. The embedded ads don’t pay much each month. The equivalent of tips during a slow afternoon working the bar at Taco Shack, the sports bar that employs me so I can afford to visit the dead so you don’t have to.

Let’s see if I can’t double my traffic while building my portfolio. And nerve.

That’s when the man with the bruises commented on the food. “That wasn’t half bad. Pasta was cooked. A surprisingly good red sauce. A tiramisu cup for dessert? What else can a guy want?”

It didn’t seem like he needed anything more. The words came out muffled through my headphones. I took them off and shrugged as if to say, “Beats me.”

“How was the chicken? I considered it but I had chicken and waffles for breakfast.”

He was anywhere from twenty-five to thirty-one years of age. His voice was clear and sharp and cut through the muffled din within the cabin. I do not have a clear or sharp voice. It’s deeper and makes it difficult for others to hear in regular situations. Loud airplanes require me to raise my voice, which increases the odds of others hearing it, making for a potentially more annoying flight experience. To avoid speaking too loud, I lean forward into the shared free space and make eye contact. When I speak, I enunciate and wrap my lips around the words.

“I’d have it again,” I tell him, wondering how long the conversation will last. I’m here for the ghosts, but will not force them. The natural state of things yields the best results. 

The conversation shifts to the wonderfully convenient open middle seat (“It might be my favorite positive from airplane travel,” I tell him), to sleeping on planes (I can sleep; he does, but only during takeoff, and even then he’s not that comfortable), to the longest flights we’ve traveled on. 

The rhythm has been struck.

The trick is always to maintain it while filing away the details of the conversation for note taking later. If I were to open a notebook or the notes section on my phone and jot down my takeaways, he’d either stop, believing I wanted my privacy, or he’d ask what I was writing, which would be more forward. I would feel bad during the first option, and make up a lie like “I remembered something I had to tell my brother,” and the second option could also be the brother lie, or the truth, which I could lead with to allow me the space to log notes to assist with the authenticity of my piece. That realness would also be reflected in how Carter reacted to my revealing the purpose of the flight to London.

Would he be afraid? Would he be fascinated? Would he ring the buzzer for a flight attendant, causing me to wonder if they would be informed of the ghost, and my relation to it? Or would he ask them for a double vodka and soda, ask if I wanted anything, which would lead to matching his order, and while chewing on ice from our respective cocktails, I would peel back the layers of why this plane, then Johnny’s Skate Rink, then the others I visited to no avail, finally dumping the cat directly out of the bag onto his head, explaining why I got into this racket in the first place.

I mentioned earlier I don’t deal in hypotheticals. Those were scenarios that crossed my mind in the minute that it took for him to share about his last flight to London, which was also a connecting flight to Ghana, his destination. 

The children with their stuffed animals as pillows are eating Reese’s Cups as a second dessert. One of them sees me watching her. I smile and wave. She does not respond, just eats her Reese’s, smearing chocolate on her lips in the process.

“Johannesburg was by far the longest,” the man explains. “I have bad joints and it’s hard to sit for that amount of time.”

I look at his skinny, bare legs. The bruises are either fresh or permanent, the type of discoloration one has no control over. I wonder about the state of his immune system, and then mine. I haven’t drank water since boarding. Orange juice would be a smart choice at some point.

“Plus, they didn’t feed us enough on that flight. It’s seventeen hours long. I know I don’t look it, but I can eat a lot. And they barely fed us.”

I have thoughts about planning ahead with snacks like pretzels and granola bars. I could share those thoughts with him, but that would not change how his stomach felt on that long flight. 

“What were you doing in Johannesburg?” I ask, committing to the conversation. The wine has my face feeling like it’s under a heat lamp. No ghosts have made themselves known. Might as well pass the time.

         “I was visiting one of our labs in Zambia. I work for the government. That’s just a short flight from Johannaseburg. Two hours.” 

He tells me he’s a microbiologist who visits labs to train staff on how to perform certain tests, mostly with blood and microbodies. His checked luggage in the bowels of the plane is filled with vials of blood. TSA in Boston gave him grief over a fanny pack he’d stored, requiring a baggage check, unzipping all three zippers on the pack, ultimately agreeing it was safe.

“They didn’t bother with the blood!” the man yells, cutting through five rows worth of people, enough to turn a few heads. “I always have blood on me, for the most part. They never check. Maybe it’s the government clearance. I don’t know. What do you do for a living?”

I finish my red wine just in time to drop it into the trash bag the flight attendant holds out. The drink cart is clocked ten rows up front. I’m tasked with deciding whether to tell Carter the microbiologist what I do for a living. One option will drive traffic, even if it’s one person, to the website. It could yield referrals. What type of people does Carter hang out with? Does he have a social media presence? And if I explain what I write about, if he jokingly asks if the plane is haunted, do I tell him? 

“I’m a journalist,” I say, grabbing onto the hand rest for the first of many times. “And bartender. In some sort of order.”

His eyes warm like flash bulbs. The unformed questions leap to his lips. “What do you write about? Who do you write for?”

I lower my voice when answering. “Let’s call my topic eerie and otherworldly sights. My audience is me, and others like me, who are interested in such occurrences. It’s a hobby.” The last line is a lie. It’s way more than a hobby. It’s my passion and won’t stop until I understand why Johnny did what he did.

“You write about ghosts?!” Carter is too loud. The way he clamps a hand over his mouth tells me he knows he’s too loud but can’t help himself.

The little girl with the Reese’s didn’t hear him, but her mother did. She wraps an arm around her daughter and pulls her away from us.

“Sorry,” he says, finally whispering. His words carry just fine. Someone needs to tell him that.

“It’s okay,” I say, and finally get my next bottle of red wine from the drink cart. “Yes, I write about them. It’s nowhere near as interesting as what you do, training other scientists. What kind of diseases have you come across? How much should I be worried about the contagion in the storage on the plane?” 

He checks my red wine and then the drink cart approaching. “One moment.” While he orders a vodka soda, I watch the aisle for activity. I know his side, from my research, is clear. The aisle on my side, however, should show signs of movement within the hour. That’s when the grandmother choked on the peanuts and the man across the aisle from her tried to help. If you’re going to enjoy this article beyond my conversation with a kind kid who works in the blood game, I need to witness how the grandmother and man played out.

“Okay.” He sits back in his chair, delighted at the glass of red liquid on his seat back table. “To answer your question, you have nothing to be concerned about. The samples are in sealed vials in an airtight storage unit. Even if the case were to be unlocked and opened, and the vials were to be taken out, and gosh, if you shattered them around the cabin, they are not contaminated. We would all be safe.”

“What are you testing them for?”

I’m not trying to interrogate Carter. He’s a nice kid who loves his job, if not flying in airplanes. Blunt questions typically mean I’m interested. “Sorry,” I tell him to calm his wide eyes. “Force of habit. Journalist, right?”

“No, no!” he says, his voice elevating over the thrumbling within the cabin. “I get it. There’s much to be learned from the African samples. Blood types. Different diets yield different results we could build future antibodies and medicine from. It’s two birds: we train their scientists with the skills to save their people, and in return they share samples with information that can help save the world.”

He pauses to take a drink, considering his statement. “It’s a bit dramatic, but you understand.”

“Sure, sure.” 

I could ask other questions, but wonder about my energy levels. The wine’s making me drowsy. I stare down the aisle, awaiting the main event, like heading to the grandstand at the county fair for the destruction derby begins. The person in front of me is watching a Batman movie. The person to their left has a video on their tablet. They’re chewing a stick of red licorice like it’s beef jerky. I didn’t bring any candy, but I did bring mints which I always store in the bottom front pocket of my backpack. I lodged it under the middle seat after asking Carter if he minded. Even if he did, I’m now certain he would not have opposed my freeing up foot space under the seat in front of me.

You learn a lot about manners while traveling.

I sense him looking at me to continue the conversation. I don’t lean down to get a mint because I still have half a cocktail. There’s no sign of the old woman. “Do you have any pets?” I ask, forging ahead.

“Oh, gosh, yes!” Carter says. “Poison dart frogs.”

I think about small, multi-colored frogs with bright skin and glassy eyes. “I know those. Beautiful creatures.”

I second guess if frogs are amphibians, thus calling them creatures.

Carter has his phone out immediately, scrolling through images. Splinters sunburst out from two cracks in the glass. “They’re amazing. I ordered from a special breeder. That’s where the coloration comes from. Here.” He stops and hands me the phone. 

The temperature in the cabin has dropped, I’m pretty sure, beyond the initial chill I took as unique to scenes from the dead but was actually air conditioning blasting from the circular vents above, the ones that are too high to reach from sitting.

There are two frogs in the picture, both in a glass tank. One has sheened black skin dark as a lake at dawn, with mauve dots across its body. The other has dappled skin like an orange dipped in hot sauce, with dark spots and lines marking its upper body and two front legs. The back legs are purple with navy spots. The eyes on both of them are dark kernels.

I scroll up for more photos, not thinking about the cracked screen.“Ouch!” I almost drop his phone, hand it to him, and examine my pulsing finger.

“Sorry, sorry,” he says. “I really need to get this fixed.”

“It’s okay. I should’ve known. I got excited. They’re beautiful. Amphibians, right?”

“Right. Are you sure you’re okay?”

I wrapped a napkin around the tip of my pointer finger. It’s not a deep cut, but the blood’s seeping through the white of the napkin. I take another napkin from him and replace the blood-soaked one. Fortunately the liquor has kicked in. It’s an annoying cut that will make typing harder than it needs to be. I’m reminded of something a professor told me at Central Michigan. Writer’s block is the paper cut of wounds. It appears small, like a hangnail, but hurts more than it should. Until you ignore it, then the pain goes away.

As I planned it, I’d encounter the ghost on the way to London, take my notes, mental or written, deboard, clear customs, head back through security, grab a pint and a meal, and write my article on the way home. I didn’t intend to be injured, quote unquote, as I wrote. (Note: That’s what’s happening right now. My finger is fine.)

“I promise. Flesh wound. What do you feed them? And are they actually poisonous?”

Carter isn’t a nerd, but I know he’ll call himself one. His excitement over frogs tells me that. “Mostly fruit flies, which I grow on my own. Grub worms, which are fancy roly polys. The ecosystem runs autonomously now. I can leave for a week or two and they’ll survive.”

I ask him how long they live because I care about the poison dart frogs. I don’t own any animals. I’m the animal, taking care of itself.

“Fifteen years, give or take.”

“Pretty long,” I say, not knowing if that’s average for a frog.

He finishes his drink. “Yes. And to answer your other question, they can be poisonous, but it depends on their diet. That’s why I feed them flies and roly polys. I also will add springtails and crickets once a month. Springtails are those little bugs you might see in your bathroom. They’re attracted to high humidity.”

“The ones that look like baby cockroaches.”

He’s too excited by that statement. “Yes! I thought the same thing when I was a child. A good food for poison dart frogs to prevent toxicity build up. At this point, mine are safe unless you were to consume them.”

“I think I’ll stick with my airplane chicken,” I say, and we both have a good buzzed chuckle.

I do a quick recap of Carter’s interesting profession and hobby, store the details away in my memory bank with the words Carter, microbiologist, blood samples, Johannesburg, poison dart frogs, fancy roly polys, fruit flies, and springtails.

“I’m a nerd,” Carter says sheepishly. I don’t hate him for it, but I’m annoyed.

“That makes two of us then. If you knew what I write about.” 

I might as well have taken the cat out of the bag and placed it on his lap to sleep the remainder of the flight. 

“Which,” I say when I see him priming to dig, mouth opened like a shovel, “I can tell you more about after I clean my finger.” 

It’s a wobbly walk to the bathroom. The plane’s pitching slightly to the side at an angle off from my drunk stumble, causing my stomach to rumble. The line for the bathroom is three deep. I pass the time watching the aisle for a grandmother eating peanuts. Inside the bathroom smells like feces and disinfecting hand soap. It is not a place I would find having sex appealing. I make the mistake of checking myself in the mirror. A ghost doesn’t appear over my shoulder, which would’ve been frightening but good for the piece. My face does, unfortunately, and if I was clever enough, it could be the face of the ghost, or a ghost. It’s a sunken ship, the husk of a burned down home, the wrinkled leather of an old jacket. 

It’s tired, is what it is.

I can sleep anywhere else but when I’m by myself. And it shows.

The cut in my finger isn’t deep but stings like it is. I wrap it in tissue and open the door with the other hand. There’s no one in line. The flight attendants are in the back, chatting about earrings and getting waxed. The lights are off in the cabin.

There you are, I think, hovering in the aisle, waiting to return to my seat. My “friend” Spencer Nick from Johnny’s Skate Rink could see remnants of the old man ghost. What would passengers on Delta 4782 see, should the grandmother appear? How strong was her essence? Would there be ectoplasm?

I laugh at my joke.

There is no ectoplasm, from what I could gather from previous spirit encounters. It would be a bit cooler if there was, maybe point to Harold Ramis and Dan Akyroyd having their own encounter with spirits, either together or separately. That’s not how the movie was penned, alas, from what I’ve read over the years. Johnny and I raved over Ghostbusters when we were kids. I was a Spengler gal. Nerdy, practical, pragmatic. He was all Venkman, and then some. Dry, sarcastic, a bit of an asshole. To see what he would’ve grown up to be.

My best friend, I knew, even after we had annoying sibling fights, even after he visited me in college and got drunk and puked on the couch my roommates and I had just bought from the thrift store. Even after he chose work instead of going to college, picking up a trowel instead of a pencil, making money hand over fist while I struggled to pay the bills by churning out articles about the five hot trends for the summer in small town Michigan for a daily newspaper. Why would he not want to get an education? I’d ask him. He’d counter by saying not only was he getting educated on how to build basements, fireplaces, houses, sidewalks, and driveways, but he was also learning how to run a business from his boss, who ran a successful masonry company. And what’s more, sister, who I love but can be a dumbass more often than not, I’m getting paid to learn. You paid how much to get a diploma that allowed you to work at a newspaper you probably could’ve interned with right out of high school, with no degree, and worked your way up, getting experience along the way, getting paid, and been making more money with more real-life journalism experience than you would’ve throwing parties and hooking up with randoms at a machine gun clip?

I would’ve punched him then, square in the jaw, or more likely the shoulder, given he was still my brother, and cried.

If he was still alive, that is.

When he was, we watched scary movies and asked questions like, What if that was real? What would you do? And the answer was always a tag team approach. Johnny and I against the world of monsters. We’d take turns setting each other up so the other could get the final machete slice. 

He would’ve dug the grandmother spector I see standing up from a seat five aisles down from the bathroom. A bald man sits in the seat watching a Pixar movie. He doesn’t notice her rouse. Neither do the two women to his right, the boy eating fistfuls of Cheerios across the aisle to his left, or anyone else on the plane. 

It’s me, arms wrapped around my elbows, shivering in the plummeting temperature, witnessing another ghost. The grandmother wears a pair of light blue cotton slacks. The drawstring is untied. Her top is a navy blue cable knit sweater, one I’d die to wear in the frigid cold. The white loafers on her feet shuffle across the aisle towards me. Her head is down as she walks, her focus on her feet as she slowly moves.

When she stops, it happens fast. Her head jolts up and back so she can grasp at her throat. Her eyes bulge from a wrinkled, kind face. I know from my research she was on this flight to visit her son and his wife, who recently had their first child, a baby boy. It was not her first grandchild, as her daughter had two children before her son. However, despite trying to not show favoritism, her son was her favorite of her two children. Flying to London to visit him and his British wife was the most excited she had been in a long time. These are paraphrased quotes from articles read and logged. You’ll find links in the appendix at the end of the article.

I’m not thinking about her son and his British wife. I’m wondering what she’s thinking when she makes eye contact with me. It’s been seventeen years since the incident on the plane. I can’t say for certain, but she hasn’t left since that day. Whether it was her choice to stay, or someone, or something else deciding, I can’t say. I haven’t had the pleasure yet. But she’s staring back at me while clawing at a throat that’s contracting due to unexpectedly consuming peanuts.

A wheeze comes from her mouth. It’s awful and desperate and cuts through the white noise in the cabin. No one notices but me. Everyone else sleeps or chats or watches a movie. 

She is my entertainment. I don’t know if I’m there to save her, to free her from this limbo, or if I’m selfishly clocking the color of her hair – a gray, silver blend I describe as elfish – to add the perfect detail to my blog article. 

She doesn’t make it to the bathroom. She drops to her knees, one arm hanging onto the armrest occupied by a sleeping teenage boy in a hoodie. That handhold only lasts a moment before she falls to her back, arms too weak to reach for her spasming throat. 

I don’t attempt to help her. 

That’s not my job.

That’s his job, the man in the sharp gray sweat suit. It looks designer the way it’s form fitted to his physique. He’s middle aged, with wispy brown hair and heroic eyes. He’s who I would want to perform CPR and mouth-to-mouth were I choking. Like the grandmother, he looks like a regular person, but his aura is outlined in a hazy shade of blue.

“I know CPR,” he calls to everyone and no one. To me, perhaps. And the dying grandmother on the trampled airplane carpet. 

Again, no one hears.

But are they listening?

The man removes a set of headphones from his and sets them aside on the floor. I’ve never done CPR. I practiced it once in health class ages ago when none of us took it seriously because at that age death seems like a rumor no one believes. Unless you’ve seen it and choose to ignore it and play along with the charade your classmates perform.

This man – Tim Ellis, 31-years-old, a realtor, married with two children, flying to London to see friends from study abroad – did know CPR. He learned it with his wife prior to the birth of their first child. Each year after they renewed their certification just in case anything happened to the kids. I’m telling you this so you don’t have to go back and watch the videos of his wife afterwards, to piece the words together between her cries.

Before beginning, Tim asks the grandmother, who also has a name – Donna – if she agrees to him performing CPR on her. He believes she’s choking, when in actuality she’s suffocating, so she shakes her head. 

“Ma’am, I need your consent before performing CPR,” Tim says loudly.

She points to her throat and to the seat above her, where a child digs his hand into a bag of peanuts. Tim misses the hint while trying to gain better footing on either side of the woman. 

“Do you give permission to perform CPR?” he asks again. 

I imagine passengers chiming in, “Do it!” “Do something!” “Is there a doctor on the plane?”

The wheezing becomes unbearable. I cover my ears and step to the side to let a flight attendant walk through the scene. She passes through them like wind through a keyhole. I think I see her pause after she’s through, but it’s hard to tell in the dim light. 

At once, the wheezing stops. The grandmother – Donna – lies silent and still. Her eyes are closed. The screams would have intensified. A lawyer yells at a defendant in the seatback TV in front of me. “Do something, man! Save her!”

Tim the realtor kneels on either side of the woman’s hips. She’s not a frail woman. She looks healthy despite the severe reaction to the peanut allergy. CPR can crack ribs when performed properly, is the point of that detail. 

Tim bends down to place his ear near Donna’s mouth. He snaps his fingers and taps her on the chest. After no response, he places two hands on top of each other on the center of her chest. You have seen CPR training videos, maybe even done it yourself, hopefully only on a dummy. If you’ve done it on a real person, whether you saved their life or not, thank you. What Tim’s doing while I still have hands covering my ears, an echo of the wheezing still ringing in my head, is counting after each compression. His voice is steady. The murmurs in the airplane would not be as calm. The attendants would be on the phones. The airplane would already be diverting course to Dublin, according to reports, still an hour away. Too long for Donna.

Or Tim.

After the thirtieth compression, Tim gently places his hand on Donna’s head to tilt it backwards and lifts her chin with two fingers. That’s to move the tongue away from the throat. He seals his lips around her mouth and breathes twice.

I’ve stopped breathing despite knowing what’s going to happen. The crowd at the scene of the accident would have collectively held their breath. 

And exhaled when nothing happened and Tim begin compressions again. 

“Are you okay, ma’am?”

I glance up from where I’m clearly staring at the aisle floor. The flight attendant who has given me two small bottles of red wine and a double vodka soda gives me a concerned look. The floor is empty in her eyes. In mine, Tim is about to tilt Donna’s head back and lift her chin again to breathe life into her dying body.

“Yes, thank you,” I tell the attendant. I pedal my heels on the floor. “Bad circulation. I need to stand or else my legs can go numb. I was trying to stay out of the way.”

“No, no, it’s totally fine. Please just let us know if we can help.”

The attendant means well. I was mostly telling the truth, and am not sure I’d feel bad either way.

Tim breathes into Donna’s mouth twice more. Her chest doesn’t rise. Her body lays still, her arms at her sides. 

He could continue, but he doesn’t. I don’t know what temperature it was when he tried to save her life, but beads of sweat dot his forehead like condensation. He’s bent over her body, panting, tongue dangling from his mouth. The crowd would be telling him nice try. They would be telling him not to give up. They’d be screaming for a goddamn doctor. 

And then Donna’s eyes flip open like shades on opaque windows. She’s there but not, alive before the death croak. Unwittingly, her body convulses upwards and her arms wrap around Tim’s back. Before he can free himself, she has his tongue between her dentures. Her jaw locks as she falls back to the floor. 

I uncovered my ears when the attendant checked on me. That allows me to hear Tim’s shriek, guttural and primeval, the sound of agony. His knees slide backwards and he falls back with Donna, the fibers of his tongue beginning to sever and rip away at the sides.

The lawyer on the seatback screen is back, passionately lecturing a jury about his client while Donna’s teeth cut through the tongue muscle and connective tissue. Tim’s tongue severs from his body. Donna rests on her side. Her dentures fall from her mouth with the tongue clamped between them. Blood sprays from Tim’s half-tongue, coating the side of Donna’s dead face. His shrieks mutate, caked in maw and blood.

The calls for doctors would surely have picked up then. Those who hadn’t begun crying would be vomiting into the seat back bag, wondering if they were the first person to puke on an airplane because of a choking woman biting a man’s tongue off. 

They wouldn’t wonder that though. That’s the sort of nonsense I would consider during a tragedy, the same way I wondered if the reindeer that had supposedly crushed my brother’s skull beneath its hooves would get the same amount of food or less after the accident. 

The shrieks stop as soon as they start. The scene has ended. Donna and Tim disappear. My body catches itself, caught off guard by the sudden change.

I blink to clear my head. My eyes are scratchy and dry. The images and details lodge in my memory bank. I’ll need to jot them, and this story, down before I get to London, while it’s fresh. 

There were no smells, I think to myself, turning back to the bathroom to use the toilet.

Tim and Donna are standing there, side by side, in front of the bathroom door. I jump and make a noise. I don’t know how loud or what sort of noise, just that people around me notice. I pedal my feet as if it was a reaction to my sore achilles and calves.

Neither of the ghosts speak. The light blue aura pulses like gasps for air around their figures. Their eyes guide me what to do, who to tell. 

It’s you. Everyone who should care about what happened to them.

I nod in understanding, make a writing gesture with my thumb and forefinger.  

Whether it works, I don’t know. Would have to travel on this flight again to know for sure. 

After a pee break and another check on myself in the mirror – yep, still a skeleton – I return to my seat in the row with Carter, who is drunk off his vodka soda. I cheers my drink against his empty glass, down it, break out my laptop, and begin typing the start to this story, which ends now, with you believing in spirits because otherwise their memories will fade.