Bonus Fiction: Firefight on the red eye
Using story cubes, I wrote this flash fiction from the Fictionistas.
At the Fictionistas April's Let's Write Together (substack.com),
and shared another prompt tool: Rory’s Story Cubes! It’s a box of nine cubes with images on them. After a roll of the dice, here was the prompt:Use the following nine images in a story (Note: you do not have to stick to the literal objects in the image, you may also use them symbolically. For example, the open eye can be wide awake, or someone being watched, or going to an eye doctor, or a cyclops character, or whatever else an eye makes you think of!)
By Vince Wetzel
Side note: I did write this on a plane. I’ll let you decide if the rest is true.
I love writing on a plane. Put in the earbuds, open the writing tablet and start typing. There are few electronic distractions. I only need a few angry side eyes to keep “grandma Lilly” from attempting to engage me in conversation, and the flight attendants arrive at the right time to offer me an alcoholic beverage to help grease the brain wheels.
And tonight, I was on a cross-country five-hour redeye from Los Angeles to New York, plenty of time to push out a few chapters of my next novel, a legal thriller set in the California Capitol city. Once I was settled, I knew the words would start flowing with the nimbleness of a gazelle, pushing forward a few red herrings, plot twists, and new suspects, before I landed at LaGuardia.
These cross-country flights were my office. Once I started writing on my small writing tablet, nothing else mattered. I barely noticed the takeoff, focused on a clandestine meeting between my lawyer protagonist and a confidential informant, and almost missed my chance to get my first rum and coke.
The alcoholic beverage went down smoothly, and soon my eyes felt like there were weights tied to them. My writing became more sporadic. I thought I might as well close my eyes for a few minutes to rejuvenate and continue writing. I looked to my right smiled as a small boy, around eleven, waved around a wand like he was summoning David Blaine out of the overhead compartment.
My eyes shed their weights when sparks shot out of the boy’s wand like shooting stars, making the cabin as bright as daylight. I shook my head with alarm. How did security let this boy through with this weapon? Surely, TSA had equipment to detect fireworks going through that X-Ray machine. I mean, once they questioned me on a lapel pin. But this kid gets away with an exploding fire work wand?
I was just about to go back to my writing when the boy waved the wand again, this time a singular bolt of lightning shot out of the wand with such a force that the boy flew back against the cabin of the plane with a loud crash. The lightning bolt flew across the plane, where it was absorbed by a gaunt and pale man.
OK, now this was starting to get ridiculous. This kid had a weapon and now he was wielding it irresponsibly. Where were his parents? I looked around the boy and the adults around him were asleep. Flight attendants? I craned my neck around and didn’t see anyone around. Was it left to me? Did I need to make a citizen’s arrest on this plane and restrain this out-of-control boy with a firework-shooting toy?
I tried to stand, but my body was restrained to the seat. I fumbled with the buckle and my fingers, typically with the dexterity that comes from typing up to 3000 words a day, continued to fumble with the latch on the buckle. What was going on?
Another flash. This time a loud explosion toward the back of the plane. I turned my head and though I couldn’t see any flames, the shadows flickering against the interior of the fuselage indicated things were getting worse. By now, I would expect a panic. But as I furiously looked around, the cabin was dark. There were no screams.
What was going on?
The boy was now in the aisle, having crawled over his sleeping parents. He stood sideways in the aisle, his weight securely on his back foot, like he was about to engage in some gravity-defying kung fu movie level fighting. His face contorted into a sneer, one I thought incapable by a pre-pubescent boy. I craned my neck around to the back for a glance at to whom the sneer was directed.
The gaunt man who endured the lightning bolt, had transformed into some kind of ogre, gray and as big as a row of seats. He also had a wand. Perhaps a redeye flight wasn’t such a good idea. Nothing good could come out of this standoff. There were no screams. In fact, the only one who noticed anything was me.
Even if no one was paying attention, I needed to get out of here.
I looked back at the boy but now he wasn’t a boy though he was still wearing his Superman t-shirt. In fact, he looked like Henry Cavill from the Superman movies. This was getting too weird.
For the first time, Cavill met my eyes. His stare was narrow and intense. He wielded his wand with such purpose, like he had spent a lifetime with one in his hand. With the skill of a chef with a knife at a Michelin-rated restaurant, he waved it and a burst of light with the intensity of a shooting star blasted the ogre against the back of the plane.
“Get out,” Cavill said, not masking the pain he felt from delivering such a devastating blow. I looked around. Everyone on the plane remained blissfully asleep and unaware of what was happening. “There’s a parachute and a hatch in the front of the plane. Use it.”
“What about the others?” I asked. “Are they going to be okay?”
“As long as you get out, everyone will be fine. But you have to leave now.”
The latch finally burst free, and I unbuckled and stepped over the grandma next to me. For the first time, I noticed she was in mid knit. Had time stood still? Was this why this magical battle between Henry Cavill and the ogre was going unnoticed by everyone but me?
“What’s going on? Why has time stopped?”
“No time to explain. I need you to go.”
“But that’s the point. Seems like time is irrelevant right now.”
“Do you really want to debate me right now? You need to escape so you can write this story. Now, go. I’m not going to ask again.”
I moved toward the front and the cockpit. Like Cavill said, there was a parachute and a hatch. As I strapped myself into the parachute, bright lights from the wands created a strobe effect in the cabin. He wanted me to escape. He wanted me to tell this story. What was I going to tell? That I watched a boy turn into Superman and battle an ogre with wands in a plane while time stood still?
I lifted the hatch, and I expected the pressurized cabin to suck me out of the plane, but nothing happened. The movies were wrong, I thought, before taking a deep breath. I was going to do this. I would escape and tell my story. I closed my eyes and jumped out and felt my stomach flow into my throat.
The airplane dinged.
“I am turning on the fasten seat belt sign as we are experiencing a little bit of turbulence. Please remain seated with your seatbelts fastened.”
I opened my eyes. I was back in my seat, my writing pad in my lap, the grandma looping the yarn in her sewing needles in time. I looked around. Most folks were still sleeping, but a few were reading or watching a movie. But time had begun again.
I looked across the aisle. Henry Cavill returned to the shape of a boy. But now he had a big magnifying glass and staring at me, the glass making his eye three times its size.
The boy put the glass down and stared right at me, winked and nodded. He gave a thumbs up.
Read my latest novel, Lose Yourself
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Ah! The wink at the end! Love this!
And you are so right, we both had the cross country flight going for us as well as the dream. And, who's to say that my protagonist's "gorgeous guy" didn't, in fact, look exactly like Henry Cavill as Superman! Lol!!
I need to take more cross country flights if you get to witness this kind of magical action!