By Nick Chandler

On the dark fields of Waterloo, Iowa, lay clusters of blacktop, hard gray bands of concrete outlined by iridescent dots.  These slender ribbons of hardened stone serve as the last earthen contacts for jumbo and prop craft alike.  It is the middle of the night and there are travelers on the tarmac.

Some skip along the strip with baggage-hauling huffs and grunts, while others, more refined, move along the narrow in quiet strides.  The crew, pilot, co-pilot, and female flight attendant, among the more refined of the bipedal movers, walk separated from the cargo of this passenger flight.  Destinations ranging from Seattle to Singapore.  As in road traffic, people are apart and traveling together, the masses converging and departing, confluence and dissemination with half acknowledged stares. 

Not all are strangers.  There is a mother and son, an old married couple, a group of four young students, two middle-aged sisters, the crew.  But the rest of this small flight is scattered populace, fifteen in all.  The flight attendant eyes a business woman’s suit, a man in a leather jacket eyes the flight attendant with an innocent and fleeting lust, the mother eyes the man in the jacket with a cocktail of emotion, a student in a scarf eyes the pilot with curiosity.  Glances and double takes, visual affirmations, cognitive breaks and re- attunements litter the runway.

They walk past the tarmac and board the craft, an aged and re-restored DC3. The plane, glinting dull night reflections of ground and high-lights, sterling silver shined by soft rag and altitude, soap and sun, is a tail dragger.

Storing bags and flipping switches, the passengers and crew prep for flight.  It starts to rain a soft frozen sleet as the attendant latches the door closed.  The flight from Waterloo, Iowa to Duluth, Minnesota, is a short one.  Doughnut wheels turn fat and heavy on the ground.  It’s 1:37am.

Flaps and ailerons, trim tabs, elevators, stabilizers, nacelles, rudders, altimeters and humming spoilerons stretch and contort, return and repeat.  Full range of motion.  The plane is cracking its fingers and rolling its neck before it decides between the blue or green wire to cut, before it crouches down to start the sprint towards long-jump, before it winds up its props like tops and zings into the night.

There is a small colony of small ants in the crust of the plane.  They take small steps and have small eyes.  The ants do not chew the wires or otherwise compromise the aircraft.  It is the airplane that disturbs the ants, catalyzing a frantic-static-jumble of disarray each time the engines start up.  For the duration of the flight, the ants remain in a suspended disharmony with the craft, vibrating with its movement and systematically freezing with ascending altitude.  Cold-blooded, they collapse still-framed in the cold, forming mounds of themselves in the curves and crests of the craft.  Once landed, the tiny hymenoptera reanimate in their heaps and go about composing themselves, returning to routine.

The ants start to panic and the plane takes to the air.

Jane, Mitch, Becky, and Henry, all Wichita State undergrads, have been house-jumping for two weeks.  Family, friends, friends of the family, friends of friends, the odd and preferably cheapest hotel, and twice under the stars, so far.

Jane, one of the students who set off to spend their winter break on the doorstep of a revolving door America, a sophomore philosophy student, a poet, is looking out the window, the hum of her buzzing head phones almost audible in the cabin.  Her cronies sit alongside her, each plugged into their own listening devices, mp3s and CDs.  Iridescent gray mobs of clouds flicker and bulge across the window. 

The odd earthen lights, a string of cars on a distant worn road, a small cluster of front porch lights, the glaring rotating lights of a car dealership, all light pollution, hums up at the craft at any odd breach between the speeding-milk cloud globs and the oval window of the DC3. 

Three of the students fill the back row, the aisle dividing them up oblong.  West to east: Mitch, with a blue ball cap, is drawn across the aisle from blond Becka, who worries about her weight, and is smack next to dark-eyed Jane who is playing to the rhythm of the cloud pulse window pane.  South to north: Henry, a seat closer to the cockpit from Mitch, wears a green and brown scarf wrapped loose around his neck and pretends to read his palm to the tune of his headphones.

Jane, with the very best view, least obstructed by silver wing or window veil, is in the very back of the passenger cabin’s right side.  She looks to Becka who has just dismounted her device, “Do you guys have a favorite word?” 

“Oh, I used too.”  Becka’s hands cross, crumbling the wires of her head phones.

“What?” Mitch, from next to Becka, turning the volume down.

“Waffle as a word is pretty good.”  Becka has decided.

“For what?”  Mitch. 

“Favorite word.”  Jane leans forward.

“Oh, does it have to be English?”  

“No.”  Jane shrugs.

“Sacapuntas.”

“What?”  Becka turns to him.

“It’s Spanish for ‘pencil sharpener,’ but it sounds like an insult.”  He smiles.

“It sounds like something dirty.”  Becka plays with her tray table latch.

“Ask Henry.”  Jane points ahead of Mitch.

“Hey Henry,” Becka taps his shoulder, “what’s you’re favorite word.”

He leans in without headphones.

Mitch rebounds, “What’s your favorite word?”

“Hum.”  Henry looks down to the iron cast seat bolt.  Then up, “Tintinnabulation.” 

Looking at them looking at him, “It’s the ringing of bells.  Church bells, or, in old towns when they had bells to mark the time.”

“That’s a cool one.”  Becka, “Mine was Waffle.

“Sacapuntas.”

“What’s yours Jane?”

“Oh. I don’t know.”  To the window, “I don’t think I have one.”

“C’mon’, you’ve got one.”  Mitch turns off his appliance.  Henry and Becka look at her.

“I can’t, I don’t know.”  She looks at them, offering nothing but a shrug.  They remount their gizmos.

The pilot, Captain Harrison, was a blue angel top-gun before secretly developing narcolepsy.  Now he flies commercial with Charlie, his brother-in-law, who holds his secret and, when need be, the wheel.

Two seats ahead the group of students, to the right and, if only slightly, to the east, are two middle-aged women.  Ladies who lunch, sisters, Ella and Louise sit next to each other.  They are positioned so that they need not look at one another to converse.  As is the case with mirrors, a party may look forward to the reflection of the other in the mirror, eliminating a need to look to the side.  Here the sonic scoop of the tubular plane wraps round, their plump luggage atop, window to the side, their seats below, the tight aisle to the west.  The rasp quip of the echoed sound of their voices gives their shushed tone a gentle reverb.  Louise is a touch taller than younger Ella, and little movements of their heads allow them to whisper brightly and efficiently.  The sisters, upon receiving tea, excite their conversation in quick spars and owl tic turns.

“It may be partly because I had an off-start,” Louise as her head bends to fix the tea. 

“Fractured folly introduction.” Ella, tearing a sugar packet.

“When you first meet someone and you remind them of someone else right off, they don’t get the chance to see you. Well, as you.  There’ll be this other you that gets conjured up.”  Louise, probing to find the tea too hot.

“Some reminiscent, half forgotten, scent of a memory.”  Ella, stirring the milk in.

“Some expectation.”

“Monotone misconceptions.” they glance up to face, then fall back, Earl Gray, to the tea.

At the very top of the passenger section, no first class, the man with the leather jacket, Leroy, is busy with a pen.  Correcting letters and moving commas.

The youngest passenger, Benjamin Miller, a six-year-old boy, is wide awake and well-mannered.  He sits with his mother, Sophia, across from the older couple.  Sophia is somewhat glamorous, and Ben wears a red and gray long-sleeve sweater.  They are connecting from Duluth to O’Hare, where Ben’s father waits. 

Theodore and Dorothy, the loyal old married couple, sit in the space between the students and the ladies, and have begun, however quietly, to chuckle.  In the misplaced little gaps of the other passenger’s discussions, the couple’s raspy low vibrato of laughter begins to drift up in volume, almost noticeable.  Theodore had learned a delicate art, abroad, many years ago.  The only part of the war he talks about, readily, is how he learned to make shadow puppets with his hands.  The story often quickly moves from the exploits of his learning to what he had learned.  He stops talking and lets the silhouette of his hands play a narrative of its own.

Dorothy had, over the years, become more than proficient at rendering her own metamorphosing zoo of shadows.  They are, again, having a shadow dialogue between their twisted phalanges and intermittent titters.

Elephants, geese, panthers, snails, rabbits, gorillas, turkeys, German shepherds, cardinals, parrots, monkeys, bullfrogs, kangaroos, are all manifest of arthritic fingertips.  The couple uses the nightlight and drawn closed window as a stage.  Dorothy has contorted an elongated rabbit and Theodore is manipulating a seat buckle edge to act as a carrot in the bunny’s paw, and occasionally mouth.  The couple is smiling.  

Benjamin catches sight of the shadow rabbit and tunes into the image.  Theodore sees his interest and motions to Dorothy, who transforms the bunny in a fixed fluid movement into a parrot on a ledge.

“Mom. Look.”

Sophia lowers into Ben’s eye level to witness the shadow mess entangle a snail and an elephant.  Sophia’s attention catches Henry’s eye and he observes the taunt of the elephant’s trunk hypnotize the sail into a bullfrog, then the bullfrog into a monkey.  The monkey takes hold of the trunk and begins to dance swing-style with it.  Henry laughs and the large loop of his scarf falls to his lap as he leans closer.  The rest of the students sit up to see.     

“Oh. Wow.”

The ladies turn back for a glimpse to find the elephant to be the large frilly face of a cardinal laughing and lunging for the monkey’s arm, it grabs hold of the limb and the monkey collapses into the sleek face of a jaguar, its ears sweetly twitching as it begins to kiss the cardinal.

Theodore and Dorothy look up, letting the star-crossed shadow-animalia-love-scene mesh unrecognizably away, to see their audience, all of whom clap.  The old

couple continues to animate to the droning hum of the engines and the rippling waves of ‘look-outs’ and giggles from the cabin for another twenty minutes.