Story #21 - Free Flier

Hello everybody! Here's this week's story. It's more character-based than most of the stories I've done so far. I hope you enjoy it! :)

Title: Free Flier (suggestions welcomed)
Warnings: None
Summary: Nancy Evans becomes someone else when she flies.
Length: ~1,400 words
Notes: First person point of view, present tense. I am not sure what the genre is.



Free Flier

                When I’m flying, I can be anyone I want to be. One flight I was a recently widowed young Southern belle whose husband had tragically died of pneumonia. Another flight I was a young girl with dreams of becoming a Broadway star. Sometimes I’ll be different people in the course of one flight. My record is ten. Ten different stories, ten different personalities, ten different habits and personal quirks.

                When I’m flying, I’m free. I don’t have to be who I am on the ground. I don’t have to deal with that woman’s problems and failed dreams and sad victories. I am free and new, raw and ready to be molded into the shape of the world. I like to think that I keep a bit of everyone I ever play in my heart. When I step off a flight, I am no longer just Tracy Evans, flight attendant, disappointment, and failure. I am Tracy, but I am also that widowed Southerner and the hopefully Broadway star, and so many more.

                Sometimes I think I should’ve been an actress. Others times I can’t imagine sticking to one role long enough to film a movie, or star in a play, or anything like that. The longest role I’ve ever done (besides the dragging muddy long role of my ground-life) was for fourteen hours, on a flight from San Francisco to Sydney. I was a single mother who missed her only child and gave out lollipops to all the children on board. That wasn’t the best idea I’ve ever had – they were running around all over the place minutes after.

                Today I’m on a flight from Los Angeles to New York City. I have about four and a half hours to become someone new. I think I’ll play Multiple Personalities. Maybe I can beat my record. Even seven different people should beat my ten-person record, because the ten-person was on a longer flight.

                I stand in the front of the plane, greeting people as they walk on. As a stewardess, I need to have a certain amount of professionalism, of course. It is beneath this mask that my personalities lie. Right now I decide to be a friendly, slightly lame jokester.

                “I’m not sure who the parent is and who the kid is here,” I comment to a mother being dragged forward by her son. She spares me a small smile before her kid marches down the aisles, her hand attached to his.

                “Make sure that suitcase doesn’t moo too loudly,” I advise a girl carrying a cow-patterned monstrosity. She mostly ignores me, but that doesn’t bother me – or at least it doesn’t bother the Friendly Lame Jokester. She just faces the next passenger and cracks another slightly lame joke.

                The passengers are all in now. I strap myself into the flight attendant’s seat for takeoff and think about who I want to be next.

                Tracy Evans lives in Salt Lake City, but she doesn’t spend a lot of time there. She’s always going on fights in her job as a flight attendant. Her parents wanted her to be a lawyer. Tracy wanted to be one too. She tried, but she simply wasn’t smart enough or good enough. She didn’t get good enough grades to even consider law school.

                So she became a flight attendant. Some days she thinks this is a perfectly acceptable job. Other days she can only think of how disappointed her parents were when she told them she wasn’t going to be a lawyer. The bitter acid-lemon-grass taste still lingers when she remembers her dad’s gruff not-looks and her mom’s icy pleading.

                All of this disappears in the freedom of flying. Tracy can forget who she is, can reinvent who she is and who she will be. She may not be feeling the wind in her hair or seeing the view from up tall in her lawyer’s office, but she’s still flying, and she’s going places some people have never gone or never will go.

                I am Tracy Evans. I know that. But I am also so much more when I fly. I am Freedom, and Choice, and New Beginnings.

                I’m making my “rounds” on the flight. It’s been maybe half an hour, and I’m on my second personality. I don’t know if I can make it to seven, but we’ll see. I like to let things take their own course. I don’t want to force any life story if I’m not feeling it. One time I felt like I should be a peasant girl from Russia, and so on the intercom I forced myself to do a Russian accent. I wasn’t feeling it at all, and it wasn’t very good, and then for the rest of the ten-hour flight I felt like I had to keep up the accent.

                I didn’t talk much on that flight.

                So I don’t force things anymore. Right now I am an uptight woman from Alabama who can’t wait for the flight to end so she can get back to her uptight husband. I walk down the aisle stiffly, back straight and arms to my sides. The seatbelt sign flashes on at the same time that I spot a man not wearing his seatbelt.

                “Sir, please fasten your seatbelt,” I tell him in my prissiest tones. Then I walk forward, making sure that not a hair is out of place in my tight bun. My husband is waiting for me at home in Alabama. Tomorrow I will see him.

                Life is good.

                One time someone called me out on my charade. I think I was a bit too obvious about it, and I was about three different people all in the same section of a plane. It was a small plane, and there weren’t many passengers aboard. As I was walking down a mostly empty area, a man asked, “Who are you, anyway?”

                Startled, I turned to face him. He had dark hair and a smile like a panther. His coal-eyes bored into mine, and I could feel him scooping out my few seconds of shock. Genuine emotion was like yogurt to him. He spooned it up.

                “I’m sorry?” I asked after a while, once I got over my surprise. I was slightly distant but potentially friendly, trying to decide who to be. I remember being torn between Flirt and Mystery Woman and sort of going for a cross between the two.

                Panther-smile saw right through me. He responded, “I’ve seen you be three different people in the course of this flight. Who are you really?”

                I gave him a flirty yet mysterious smile. “No one special.”

                The man simply shook his head. “Why do you do it?”

                I smiled. “Because I can.”

                Panther-smile frowned. “You should try being yourself, once in a while,” he replied. “See what happens.”

                I shrugged. “Maybe some day,” I said, and then glided off to be someone else.

                I think about Panther-smile now as take a break, sitting in my chair. At the time, his words didn’t mean much to me. I was new to flying, and I was new to being free, and there was no way I would listen to someone advising me to do something else.

                But something occurs to me now. The flight is nearing its end, and I’ve done six personalities. I’m tired.

                Maybe one of my personalities can be Tracy Evans.

                My mother once asked me why I was so unhappy with myself. I thought about telling her about the old-battery taste I get whenever I remember her disappointment. I thought about explaining the freedom of shedding my skin like a snake and flying free. I thought about telling her about the dust on my LSAT books, the dust that became all that is left of my dreams.

                I didn’t tell her any of that. I told her that I was perfectly happy with myself.

                At the time I was lying. At the time Tracy Evans was nothing but a burnt-up husk ripped at the seams and patched with lint and the thoughts that everyone has but no one wants to say.

                But now, as I go through my rounds again, I give Tracy Evans new life. I let her be herself, not someone else or what she thought she should be.

                I let me be me. And to my surprise, it’s even more freeing than being a future Broadway star or a Russian peasant.

                THE END! J