FROM THE AIR

By Tony Spencer

This can't be happening. He needs all the sleep he can get to be on top of things at the meeting tomorrow. The company badly needs that contract.

What was that dream about, anyway? He can remember some things, but they are washed out, like old photographs.

The plane, flying into a storm. The lightning, picking out the faces of the other passengers. The haunted look in their eyes chills his bones. What then? For the briefest of seconds he grasps hold of something else, but then it slips free.

"Could I have a glass of water?"

The hostess brings something to wash down his sleeping pills. Drug induced sleep is better than no sleep at all.

Waiting for the medication to do its job, he reads the the Wall Street Journal edition for the 1st week in November. Just before sleep takes hold over him, he takes one last look out the window, making sure that the wing is, indeed, still attached to the plane.

He is carried away on a wave of blackness.

Lightning flashes, showing the faces of those around him in stark portrait. Clouds are whipped around them, like ghosts in the night sky.

The dream is happening all over again.

The plane is rocked by the strong wind. Straining metal drowns out the cries of those seated around him.

An eye opens in the fuselage, the emptiness beyond looking in at them. One of the air hostesses urges them to put on their oxygen masks. He sees his newspaper fly into the void, as if it has a life of its own.

The captain's voice rings over the intercom, barely audible over the air being sucked from the plane. Seconds later the plane lurches sickeningly downward.

He wants to wake up. He wants so much to wake up.

The pilot tries to level out, but altitude is bleeding away.

The whitecaps grow closer, cold arms of the ocean reaching out for them.

The crests of the waves remind him of piles of bones, scattered over the water.

The air hostess is demonstrating how to use the life jackets. He thinks even she knows life jackets will be no use in this one.

"ASSUME CRASH POSITIONS."

He can hear the waves. They roar like living things, waiting to tear them apart. The sound of prayer carries throughout the airplane.

"Now I lay me down to sleep," the girl's face looks old beyond years.

Lightning flashes, the ocean looks like a black hell. The waves beckon him to join them.

"I pray the Lord my soul to keep."

The water grows closer. There is no hope.

"If I should die before I wake," like a drowning man he fights against sleep, clawing for the surface.

His eyes open once more. Something is very wrong. Nothing has changed.

"I pray the lord my soul to take."

Now the crests of the waves look like teeth. Millions of human teeth.

Like a dream, the airplane disintegrates. The ocean devours them whole.