Short Fictions, Thrills And Wonders

The Pilot

I stare out of the windows, and peered down, as I have always done. The plane is still flying.

I closed my eyes and dived down into the sea of memories once more.

I was young. (I still am, but it felt different back then, when time isn't stationary and still flowed like water downhill. Youth meant something back then, now, it's just another circumstantial occurrence to me.) I was filled with vigour and simply had too much energy to spend. So I joined the army. It was year back then, when the war was at its most gloriously devastating peak. I think I had a family, but perhaps it was just one of my fantasies, I can't tell which from which anymore. I knew I was a pilot for something in the past, how else would I be allowed a plane, but the details are gone from me. There are certain names that I recall, a Mary Terise, someone called Edward Tarr, but the names no longer held meaning for me. They are shells. Empty vessels that once had a purpose that was forgotten by its creators. I know that I had experiences with flying, or at the very least was familiar with the mechanics of a planes, for the army officials wouldn't give an inexperienced man a plane to fly and a mission to complete. I was sent, along with the rest of my squadron, for a mission to bomb some city that I had forgotten. I remember dropping the bombs, I saw the place go up in flames. What I can't see were the orphaned children, the families separated, the innocent crying and wailing, the men and women that lie dead or living on the ground, the injured, the unhappy dead and the miserable living. Ignorance is bliss. And I had wished, for one moment, that I can live in that blissful ignorance and never had to listen to the effects of my actions. I prayed that for one moment, the plane would keep flying for the rest of eternity and I would never have to set foot on the ground. So that I would never have to listen to reports of the living on the dead or the injured. And at that moment, I wanted that more than anything else in the world, I wanted blissful ignorance.

Be careful of what you wish for.

I remember that as the rest of my squadron all turned back, I was stuck there, fumbling with my controls. Nothing seems to work anymore, and the plane was flying me away from my fellow army men. Away from home, away from everything. It would be a lie to say that I didn't panic at the moment. I remember knocking against the glass, pulling all the levers, flipping all the switches and punching the buttons in a bid to get the plane to do anything but stay on the air. I eventually realised that my futile attempts are useless, so I abandoned them and simply waited until it ran out of fuel and crashes.

I waited for a day. Then a week. Then a month. Then months, years and so on. I have lost track of time, but it must've been at least eighty, maybe ninety, years since I made that horrible prayer. I haven't aged a day, and I continued to live despite finishing all my water and food rations which I had smuggled onto the plane. I have lived, if you call this living. It seems, like I am stuck in a strange pocket in the fabric of time and space where the laws of time doesn't apply.

In these years which I had flown, I have seen many things. The plane doesn't fly in a straight line. In fact, it flies in irregular patterns which I can only describe as peculiar. One moment it is in war-torn Syria, the other moment it is circulating the White House undetected by radars and people. It seems to be directing itself at the largest catastrophe on the planet now, although I probably can't see half of the things it is trying to show me, for catastrophes now happen in offices and buildings, and less in places where I can spy from the skies.

Random pieces of paper occasionally spring up time to time around me. I do not recall bringing paper with me into the plane. Sometimes I take this as a sign from the heavens that I need to write and record. And so I write and I record diligently, never missing the details that I can capture up here.