In Case of Emergency

The Three Word Wednesday words look deceptively easy this week.

Initial
Knock
Weather


At first I was relived because they really seem to go together well and surely an obvious story would leap into my mind from them but....not so much.

Just as it holds true that love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant...the muse is fickle, the muse asks not what you want but gives what she deems, the muse is stingy and moody and stubborn.

The muse is within me and I am within her. Sometimes the words flow easily between us and sometimes it is akin to caged deathmatch with me fighting for my creative sanity. But the muse always wins. She’s a badass that way.

This is the story the muse wants to tell this week:




In Case of Emergency

There is one sound a pilot never wants to hear. It’s a hard knock of metal on metal and always immediately proceeds the most silent silence known to man. Tyler knows that if he ever hears that sound there will only be minutes left in his life.

He thinks it won’t ever come. But one sunny, cloudless afternoon-perfect flying weather- it does.

The initial thought that floats through his mind is: Maggie.

She’s not his wife. He put off the wedding five times and after the sixth she had asked him “Why don’t we admit we’ve gone as far as we are going to go together?”

He reached out to pull her close, that day, to soothe away her fears and make all the promises he had a million times before but she didn’t want to be touched then, or comforted, or lied to anymore.

She found herself a school teacher and eight months later they were husband and wife. Tyler went to the ceremony and danced with the bride. He felt relived to not have to be someone’s husband and only now, as he plunged toward Lake Michigan in his single engine cessna, did he see how damn foolish he had been.

Maggie had a blonde haired two year old son now. A child he could have fathered, but didn’t.

Tyler didn’t see his whole life flash before his eyes. The bungee cord jumping, the motorcycle racing, the climbing to the top of every mountain in this hemisphere was wiped from his mind. All his big triumphs in corporate America, the wild days of being a frat boy, the time he took his first sip of beer, and kissing Kelly Winters at the roller rink in seventh grade - all those things he swore he would never forget- might as well have not happened at all because to Tyler, in these last seconds of his life, they did not exist anymore.


All he could see in his mind eye’s was Maggie. His hands gripped the wheel as he tried to pull out of the freefall, knowing it was too late now but having to try anyway. He wanted to get back to her. To slip out of this place and time and back to when she still believed in him. He had always been so selfish with professing his feelings for her. She had to drag it out of him. He wanted to scream his love for her now.

The water rushed up at him, sucking him into its depths, flooding the cabin with its icy life stopping force. he squeezed his eyes tightly close and did not see the blue-green coffin around him, instead Tyler took his last breath seeing the woman who had loved him better than he loved her. And his last thoughts were not of himself, his goals unfulfilled, of the old age he would never see. Instead it was all about her:

You were more than my love, Maggie, you were my best friend. I don’t want you to cry for me but I know you will...I should have said yes....I should have kept you mine...I should have...oh.