Francine usually avoided baggage claim, especially after an international flight arrived. The palpable, cranky energy that rolled off the living as they watched other people’s luggage bump down the ramp was enough to put her on edge for days. She ignored the red flags her brain flung out and held her ground, waiting. Again.
Hours passed. When even the security guards were dozing in their uncomfortable chairs, the baggage conveyor belt’s fogged plastic flaps parted to admit an abandoned duffel. An ethereal shape draped itself over it, quickly apparent as a diaphanous, boy-sized human that leaped off the carousel and ran to Francine. “You’re back!”
“Yeah. I’m back.” She glowered at the boy and headed away, back to her own concourse. “Can’t stand this space. Awful people, just awful.”
The boy followed her up the broad, solid stairs where in front of the Dunkin’ Donuts in Terminal B, they sat on the edge of a planter that faced a ceiling-to-floor fountain, colors and images projected onto the droplets. Francine couldn’t remember when she first noticed the fountain, but she spends hours gazing at the images, all New York City icons, as they pour from the ceiling in an endless, translucent loop.
“I tried to get a kid to come play with me, but his mom called him away.”
“Yeah, I saw.” She paused, turned so she could look him in the eyes. “Give it up. You’re dead. They’re alive.” She waved her arm at the few souls standing in line for their caffeine. “They don’t want to know you’re here.”
“I don’t get why I am here.” He kicked at a bench and watched his foot pass through it. “You’re supposed to go someplace else. Not an airport.”
She nodded toward the living in front of them. “Most of them think either it’s oblivion or the choice between harps and everlasting flame.” She paused, gazing past him. “I used to try to talk to people, but it just doesn’t work. Takes too much energy and they get so freaked out.” She looked down at her blood-stained hands as she wiped them on her pants. Again. Good thing she was dead; getting around without legs was easier when you could float.
He looked her in the eye. “I think I know how I died – I got on the baggage carousel and rode inside, and…” he stumbled to a halt.
“Sometimes I wish I knew and then other times…well.” She looked down at the eternally dripping blood, marveling at how it disappeared into the shiny floor tiles. “This might be hell.”
He shot her a look from under his bangs. “Hey, I’m a kid. Kids aren’t supposed to go to hell.”
“I suspect they’re keeping something from us, always have. Besides, I don’t get why death has to be such a big mystery. And all this waiting?” She tried to snap her fingers and failed. Friction is such a tricky thing. “I do know that I don’t want to spend the rest of whenever – is there even eternity? – here in this crappy airport. Hey!”
On her word “airport,” the boy jumped up, breezed right through her and landed on a concrete planter. “I think I remember when I was alive that….” He trailed off, stumped, his ghostly face twisted into puzzlement.
The old woman shivered as she brushed off the essence of the boy’s passage, wiping her hands on her pants. Ghost passing through ghost – that was a first for her. Very off-putting.
The way time scopes and stretches puzzled her. It’s hard to grasp exactly what the when was – is it a year ago? Ten minutes ago? Counting up the hours and days, even weeks, to make any sense of chunks of passed time – well, that was slippery.
For a moment, she was consumed with curiosity about this boy as he cartwheeled into the elephant ear palms that rustled with the breeze of his passing elemental self. She watched as he flailed to get upright, then that curiosity morphed into a completely foreign urge to be helpful. Just this once.
She floated to him and extended her hand. “Try this, kid. Just think solid, and try to grab.” On the third try, their fingertips connected and she tugged. He jumped down from the planter and brushed the seat of his pants, dislodging the nothingness that wasn’t there.
“How did you know to do that?” he asked.
She had a momentary sensation of vertigo. “Absolutely no clue. Huh.” She shook her head, looked at her hand, resisted wiping it on her pants and focused on the boy in front of her instead. “What’s your name, kid?”
He paused. Looked down, slight frown on his face. “It’s David. After my uncle.” He hoisted himself onto the planter ledge and poked at a dead leaf, trying to move it. “I’m thinking as solid as I can,” he said, leaning down to blow on it. Still nothing. “What’s your name?”
“Francine,” An image flashed into her mind. “After my gran.” It was nice, getting these little snippets of memory now and then, so vivid, almost like being there. Just for a moment.
One snippet she had just the other day (or last year? no telling) was from her final trip home to Italy. She’d been gone so long and had no idea what to expect. The atmosphere of any welcome would be known immediately when she looked into her sister’s eyes – there would be welcome or the usual resentment. However, this visit Maria was glad to see Francine – the sister who had “abandoned the family” – and the reunion was almost joyful.
The trip back to the US, however, was not. It dead-ended here, in LaGuardia International Airport for crying out loud. She never made it home to Hoboken, where her two cats held sway in her aging and rundown rowhouse. They are good cats, Muriel and Fred. She misses them, Frednmuriel, imagining them in their favorite snoozing spots, hoping she’d see them in whatever after-thing comes next. Skepticism aside, she held onto the prospect that this gleaming, perpetually under-construction airport wasn’t the end of the line.
“Maybe they’ve just forgotten about me,” she mused. “After all, how many people die actually inside an airport? Not plane crashes – I made it from there to here just fine – but actually kick the bucket inside a transit lounge?” She shifted her butt cheeks on the planter’s edge, just to get the fleeting sensation of solidity. David plopped down next to her.
“Well, Francine,” David banged his heels against the planter with some success, “I’m getting solid.” More banging. “Have you ever seen other, um, people like us here? In the airport?”
“Nope, just me.” She didn’t know why she’d never looked. Well maybe she did. The steady drip, drip of blood from the stumps of her legs was disagreeable, even to her, and she was used to it. Besides, who needs company?
“Well, I’m going to go look,” said David. He jumped down and headed toward the Eastern concourse.
“What, and leave this lovely view?” She was gratified to know sarcasm was still easy, even though the view was actually lovely, the fountain this way, gleaming windows and airplanes that way. She shrugged, hoisted herself up and floated after the boy. After all, she’s got nothing better to do.
Well into the wee hours, the airport was still quiet but not dead. A flight from London had just landed and the passengers flooded the way out, briskly rolling their bags to the next destination. Francine could see that David was hesitant to walk through people (more than a little creepy she had to admit), so they had to squeeze into the crowd. Turn-on-a-dime maneuvers are tough when you’re floating, so Francine ended up cruising through more than one live person, a move that always left her feeling pulled-apart, like monkey bread. As if maybe part of her wanted to stay behind. She wondered what it felt like to the living or if they even felt a thing. Some would get this odd, faraway look and slow for a moment. Some would reach down and scratch a knee. Almost all immediately looked down at their feet.
Off the sidewalk and heading to the gates, Francine had her doubts about the whole enterprise. What if there weren’t any other lost souls wandering LaGuardia International Airport? How is it I have not seen another…
She got mentally stuck on the word “ghost.” Ghost connoted something vague, transitory – here, then gone, poof. She felt very much here – even if “here” was confined to a terminal in an airport. Now and then she wondered how long she’d been in this state but always came to the same unsatisfactory conclusions – first, time was an even more unstable construct than she ever guessed; and second, maybe she could have kept better track of it if she’d paid attention to the incessant blather of the waiting lounge televisions. And the perpetual construction. It did seem to move around, but she’d never bothered to note when one project was finished and they transitioned to the next.
David was getting way ahead of her on the moving sidewalk. It looked like he was figuring out either friction or solidifying because he was actually walking on the moving belt and speeding right along with the flesh-and-blooders. She tried floating faster to catch up and couldn’t until he reached the end and stumbled a bit as his momentum changed.
“Where do we go from here, Francine?”
She wiped her always-bloody palms again and hitched up her pants. “Back in the day I seem to remember that I was a radio news reporter, pretty good at getting around red tape. Don’t think that’s going to help much here, though.”
“Red tape?”
“That’s – oh, never mind.” She jerked to a stop. If she’d had feet, she would have skidded on the shiny tiles. What zipped around that corner? She had another sensation of powerful curiosity – what was happening to her? Ages with nary a ripple in her rooted apathy and now this. Fascinating. And deeply troubling.
She shook it off and pointed toward the newsstand. “Let’s head over there,” she said, drifting through the growing early morning crowd.
Francine was tempted to stop and read the book covers and blurbs in the newsstand, see if the books and mags were the same as the others she’s seen. Of course she couldn’t actually read the contents – you can’t read a book if you can’t pick it up. You can read everything that is face-up, though, and she did, for a long time, until the dissatisfaction of not knowing what was under the covers became too much. She avoided newspaper headlines after that one day she saw “Killer Escalator Mangles Woman” on a tabloid with an equally horrifying subhead of how the escalator steps opened up exposing the machinery. The woman’s screams as her legs were ground up in the moving gears could be heard all the way to the tarmac. It hit her viscerally, though she didn’t understand why.
Instead, she headed to the dark space between the newsstand and the sandwich vending bar, angling herself so she couldn’t be seen from the narrow space, the drawback being that she couldn’t see in. David ran ahead but stopped short of the alley and flapped his hand for her to hurry up. She didn’t. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see what she thought she had seen – a human shape, not even a shape. More of a hint, a wisp. But it was enough to bring on a wave of yet another emotion she hadn’t felt in ages – longing. Loneliness. She wanted to find (yet didn’t) this – being? fellow wraith? (never ghost) – out of curiosity but even more to capture a sense of connectedness. Since spending this bit of time with David, she realized that she craved some world-weariness in an acquaintance.
David peeked around the corner into the gap between the two businesses. “I don’t see anything,” he said, squinting into the darkness.
Francine drifted up behind him and peered into the gloom. There – way in the back, a wispy shape, like smoke coiling on an updraft, pinky-orange in the dim light. A face. Long and thin, above a vaguely human shape. Francine was mesmerized by the colors even as she wished the face would stop swirling. As soon as she mentally voiced the thought, it stopped the coiling and pulled itself together into a spectral facsimile of a young man holding a beer. Mid-twenties, mixed race, one of those razor-cut beards with the edging so precise you wondered at the tools required for the job. He tilted his beer to Francine. “I like to change colors. I can show you my purple palette if you want.”
Francine gawked at him until her mother’s voice in her head chided her for staring. Even so, to her mild amazement she wasn’t all that rattled by this encounter, though the swirling colors, well. Inspired by the fountain? She definitely needed to know how he did that.
He pointed his beer at her dripping stumps. “Dude. What the fuck?”
“She won’t tell me,” David’s voice squeaked out before he coughed his way to a lower register.
“No idea,” she snapped, as the image of that lurid headline popped into her head. “Nice beard.”
The stranger smoothed his mustache, in a gesture cliché and deliberately overdone. Francine almost laughed. Another foreign sensation, she thought. First curiosity, now amusement.
“Whatever. Looks like it sucked though.” He flipped the beer can into the air and caught it on the flat of his palm. “Empty. Can’t drink it anyway, but it was a good prop on stage.”
“Are you an actor?” David hadn’t stopped staring since the young man materialized.
“Nah. Stand-up comic and they told me I was pretty bad at it. Used the beer as something to talk to, like a ventriloquist dummy, except it didn’t talk back. Much.” He flipped the can again. “Had it in my hand when I died, ergo, ipso facto.” He slid the beer into an inside pocket of his trench coat, momentarily exposing a dark stain over his left breast. “So, little dude, how did the fickle finger of fate flick you into this universe?”
“Huh?”
“How’d you die, dude?”
“That’s David. He doesn’t remember,” Francine interjected, pointing at his chest. “But what about that? Was your comedy that bad?”
“It was bad, lady, but no one ever threatened my life over my shitty jokes. I owed somebody money who wasn’t sympathetic to my impoverished state. Got me in the men’s can by gate 52, maybe ten minutes before my plane to Belize was supposed to board.”
She huffed sympathetically. “So how long have you been stuck here?”
“Stuck? No one’s ever stuck here – Francine, right? I’m Delbert.”
How did he know her name?
“I’ve been here…” he peered up at the nearest flight announcement display, “…almost a week, and they said it looks like I’m scheduled soon.”
“They told you?” Francine sputtered. “Who is they?”
Delbert shrugged. “I’ve only met one other person here besides you two, an old lady who died of a heart attack in the American Express primo club, and she knew someone who choked to death at the sushi place on C. Seems like there’s always someone kicking the bucket around here.”
“How do you know you’ve only been here a week? Doesn’t time seem to be a bit weird to you?” She drifted to a halt in front of him. “Who was president when you died?”
“President? Y’know, I’m not really sure. Seems like whoever was way old, a real fossil.” He snapped his fingers, drawing Francine’s envy. In a few days, he’d conquered solidity, friction, and that amazing swirling color business. And she couldn’t even open a magazine. Was it possible for the spectral world to improve its phantasmal technology? What else has she missed existing in this loop in a literal transit station?
She had to stop and think all this over for a moment. A real fossil? Even from the young man’s point of view, she couldn’t see how Bill Clinton could be construed as a fossil. She floated to a gate waiting area and let herself drift into an empty chair, deliberately a few seats away from a dozing woman. Experience proved that even though they couldn’t see her, a solid percentage of the living could sense her presence and the deep trauma buried within. They’d squirm, look around, lean away without knowing why, and eventually find a reason to leave, even to just move to the next row.
She listed all the emotions she’d felt in the last measurable period of time, an hour? a day? Who cared. But – there was amusement. Loneliness. Curiosity. That was the most fun. But why is this the first time she’s felt lonely? Had she ever even asked for answers? Had she not had any questions? David has been nothing but questions since she spotted him doing cartwheels by the bar in the atrium.
David and Delbert were heads together over by the bookstall. She hadn’t been paying attention to their conversation and could barely hear, anyway, but as soon as she tuned in, she heard David’s question.
“What am I doing here?”
Delbert stopped the incessant swirling and gracefully floated to the floor. “I don’t know shit, but I think this is a waiting room. Like at the doctor’s. They like to make you wait and think before they do whatever it is they’re gonna do.”
“Are you afraid?”
Delbert spun up to a lovely turquoise. “One minute I’m about to toss this beer and blam! Big noise, massive pain, then nothing. Then here? Took me a while to catch on to my situation, as it were. So here I am, hanging around Starbucks like I’m looking for a handout. But no one can see me. And I can float.” He flipped the beer can that suddenly appeared. “Yeah, kid, I’m afraid.”
David looked like he was going to cry again, and Francine wondered if she had any tears in her as she floated toward him. Another damn emotion.
“I am really and truly dead,” he said, jamming his hands into his pockets. As he turned, Francine saw for the first time the deep dent on the crown of his head, the blood-matted hair, and the sticky mass oozing from underneath. She didn’t want to think about what that was but she did wonder, briefly, why it took her so long to notice. Guess I’m just getting old, she thought. Wait, I am old. I was old. I’m not old anymore because I’m not anything and time doesn’t mean much where I am.
She floated straight down to the floor, confused and, for the first time in who knew, afraid.
“Delbert, what year is it? Who’s president?”
“Some old guy. Biden.”
“But what year?”
“Shit, Francine – it’s 2023? Where have you been?”
I’ve been right here, she screamed inside her own head. If Francine could breathe, she knew the air would be knocked right out of her, a punch to the solar plexus. “1999,” she whispered. She’d been floating around Terminal B in the LaGuardia International Airport for twenty-four years. Clueless. Legless. Destination unknown.
Suddenly David went stock-still, head cocked to the side, eyes vacant, trancelike. His eyes rolled back into his head then snapped to awareness. He shook all over, like a dog, and looked from Delbert to Francine, speechless. Then he managed, “I heard it, the voice. In the middle of my brain.” He reached up to his head, hand hovering over the broken place. “I know how I died.”
Francine’s jaw dropped. She managed to contain the shriek she felt boiling up from her gut at the sheer injustice of it all – why in whatever place they were has she never heard any voice or gotten any instructions? For almost a quarter century!
David looked at the two adults, eyes wide. “I’m scared.”
“Ha. If anyone has any reason to be scared, it’s me,” Delbert said. “I’m the shitheel in this group.” He executed a lazy swirl over the escalator, turquoise fading to orange, then glanced at Francine. “Or am I?”
She had nowhere to go with that – was he being snide or was there a grain of truth? Had she lived any kind of righteous life? Did it matter? Was it supposed to matter? She looked skyward, bloody fists clenched, stumps dripping the blood that disappeared into the floor, as usual. “Why not me? When’s my turn?” she cried.
“Go figure,” Delbert said. “I mean, look. Last in, first out.”
David was speed-walking toward the escalator back down to baggage claim and paused, looking back. “This is where they said to go,” he called over his shoulder as he stepped onto the moving step. As Francine and Delbert watched, the stairs carried him into the bowels of the airport. He faded. Not just from view – he faded to indistinct, more wraithlike, then a wisp of fog, then gone.
Delbert whistled softly. “So that’s how it happens.” He drifted next to Francine and reached for her hand which (of course) passed through his own, leaving the barest of vibrations tingling up her arm. “I think I’ll try that tomorrow.”
Francine knew if she was alive she’d be exhausted. Shocking time warps, realizations….how could even a dead a person handle it all? At this particularly bizarre moment in time, whatever that meant, since she would never be home in Hoboken with her cats, all she wanted was to be back on her boring concourse. Or to the next level, whatever that was.
Without looking back, she floated up and off the floor and began retracing her steps to Terminal B. Delbert called her name once, but she didn’t answer. He didn’t call out again.
Back in her familiar haunt, Francine sank back into the ennui she’d been in for decades. Days unmarked came and went. Once, loneliness ambushed her and she made her way back to where she’d seen Delbert next to the Starbucks and David disappear down the escalator. Of course, David was gone for all eternity, but she wished – just a little bit – that Delbert was stuck here, too, and swirling his splendid colors in the alley.
Nothing. No one. She waited around for a while, but he never appeared. So Francine sat at a table, ignoring the discomfort of a young couple occupying the other chairs, and waited. Over and over, she floated over to the escalator that had carried David to eternity and where Delbert said he’d go the next day, and looked down its length, at those clanking metal stairs with those sharp-edged teeth where step melted into step, and cringed, her guts twisting with fear. She watched and waited, counting the steps as they continued their relentless, cruel descent.
Leslie Wolfe (she/her) is a former award-winning broadcast journalist and retired high school English teacher. Her poetry and fiction writing have appeared in the literary magazines, The Kennesaw Review, and Seedlings, published by the International Reading Association. She lives in rural north Georgia with her partner.
Instagram: @lccwolfe
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