Episode 1
NOTHING LIKE THE AIRPORT:
A short story about an unforgettable family airport experience featuring an exhausted family, a fifteen hour flight, and a chain reaction nobody saw coming.
Let me set the scene.
A family of five has just arrived in the United States after a fifteen hour flight from Asia. I think survival is the key word here, as the flight is the kind of flight where the person next to you gets up every ten minutes, smells, snores, and takes the arm rest. The turbulence comes in waves, usually when you are trying to go to the bathroom or order that drink you’ve been waiting on for over an hour. Suffice to say, nobody ate, nobody slept, and nobody arrived in good spirits.
The plane lands.
And there is a collective exhale of five people who have been holding it together for fifteen hours and finally, almost, can sense home (meaning a long hot shower and the perfect take out meal).
However, all that stood between this family and a hot shower and a decent meal was a people mover to baggage claim and a taxi ride home. Easy enough, or so they thought.
Once they deboarded the plane, they piled into a packed people mover. The kind of packed where personal space is a concept that no longer applies. The father and middle child (child one of three) get stuck in the back while the rest of the family end up near the front. They are separated by a wall of people but it is only a short ride to baggage claim. The people mover starts moving and within two minutes the end is already visible and everything is going to be okay.
For about sixty more seconds, everything was okay. All of a sudden there’s a sound.
The middle child registered it before he understood it. Something between a gasp and a cough. Coming from the left. From somewhere very close on the left. And then, before his brain had completed the sentence it was trying to form, something warm hit him.
He looked down.
He looked up.
He looked down again. A stranger. A complete and total stranger standing directly beside him on the people mover had, without any warning, without any prior indication that this was about to become a situation, projectile vomited.
Not near him. Not in his general direction. On Him! Yes, on him.
There was vomit from a stranger on him and he did what any normal person would do in that situation and stood completely still.
There is a state of shock that exists beyond the normal stages of shock where your body simply stops processing new information. This was one of those times.
He turned to his father.
The dictionary describes a father as a “Man who gives care and protection to someone or something.”
Safe to say, the father in this situation did not live up to that definition. He acted more like a person in a car with the windows down near a homeless person and suddenly the homeless person comes running up to the window and the driver rolls up his windows and acts like he’s looking at something in the sky.
His father was right there. Two feet away, well a modest two feet away. He had seen the whole thing, the sound, the impact, the aftermath, all of it. The father looked at his son. He took in the full picture. He could see the pain, shock, and disgust coming from his son's face. The father had assessed the situation in seconds and decided he didn’t have the capacity to deal with this after the travel day they’d had, so he looked away.
The middle child stood there, alone.
Covered in vomit.
Alone.
On a people mover with nowhere to go, no one to help, surrounded by strangers who had seen everything but figured the father also known as the “protector” would take care of his own child.
About sixty seconds later they reached their destination.
The family gathered around the baggage claim, while the middle child sprinted to the bathroom. In coincidental fashion there were no paper towels and the sink was the automatic hand sink or the sink that only works until after you have given up waving and walked away from it.
He took his shirt off in panic and ran it through the half functional sink. He threw water on himself to wash off any remains of the strangers' vomit. He stood at the mounted hand dryer station, shirt off, drying himself while strangers watched and offered no help. I guess when someone has vomit on them, decency goes out the window.
The child was able to get a majority of the vomit off before the family’s ride home. The ride home was about forty minutes and for about forty minutes the child explained his disgust and misery to his family. The family who survived a horrendous fifteen hour flight in the air was now being broken by the car ride home.
Once home the child showered for thirty minutes. Standing there thinking about every risky meal, every questionable adventure, and every moment that could have gone wrong on his trip throughout Asia. None of it got him. A five minute ride on a people mover, did.
That evening once everyone had showered and takeout was being eaten at dinner the mother looked across the table at the eldest child and said “You don’t look well.”
What happened next took about one millisecond. The eldest child turned and threw up directly onto the father.
The father sat completely still. He looked down. He looked up. He processed what had just happened to him in the same stages the middle child had gone through several hours earlier.
The father turned slowly towards the middle child. The middle child looked at his father and with a smirk on his face said
“At least we have paper towels here.”
Nobody Asked. Now you know anyway.
