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- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Sylvia Barry
- Language: English
- Genre: Contemporary romance
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- Size: 2.1 MB
- Price: Free
July 15th – One month until the convention
I think it was Douglas Adams who once wrote something along the
lines of how it was no coincidence that not a single language on earth had
produced the saying “as pretty as an airport.”
This is because an airport is a bloody miserable place to be, no matter
what language you speak or whatever your culture’s concept of pretty
entails. Airports are designed to suck the life force right out through the
pores of your skin and use it to fuel the neon and fluorescents, not to say the
automatons known as airline employees.
The flight from Heathrow to New York had been downright awful, but
somehow the flight from New York to LAX had been just as ambitiously
unpleasant. The plane was smaller, which meant the turbulence had been
worse, as had the food, the service, and the quality of people. The middleaged man sitting next to me, whose muscular bulk all but obscured the aisle
beyond, appeared to have eaten something pickled prior to boarding, which
had turned on him, and he’d shared his misfortune with the rest of the
passengers in a variety of ways. I had tried to disappear into my corner,
staring out the window, then had remembered in the nick of time my lack of
fondness for heights and small spaces.
But that business had been over and done with for some time now, and
I was once more standing on solid ground. Armand Demetrio, intrepid
cartoonist stepping boldly into the land of the free and home of the brave.
That was, of course, assuming I’d clear customs.
After explaining to the severe, steel-jawed men in uniform that despite
my complexion and accent I was not, in fact, a terrorist, but, as previously
mentioned, an intrepid cartoonist, I was unceremoniously tossed back into
the passenger hall, having been searched, interrogated, and implicitly
admonished for not having the decency to be a god-honest terrorist. I could
only imagine that the good bruising of a man’s dignity was a cherished and
prestigious art form in this country.
Eventually, I managed to locate the carousel which (so promised an
assortment of lighted dots) would soon furnish me with my luggage. I found
a place to stand, maneuvered my muscles into an autopilot arrangement
designed to instantly wake me if and when I began to tip over, but
otherwise was left free to lose a degree of consciousness.
I was quite happy to hold this position for as long as it would take for
my luggage to appear, but I soon became aware of some sort of . . .
humming nearby. Far from an electronic or mechanical hum, this was the
sound of a happily atonal Homo sapien unintentionally sharing their selfsatisfaction with the rest of the world.
I couldn’t help myself; I glanced over.
He was a radiant specimen of as-seen-on-TV America: the delicately
sun-bleached hair, the taut and lightly flushed skin over a sharp jaw and
respectable cheekbones, straight nose, perfectly white teeth, and eyes that
were so full of joy they might as well have been shooting laser beams of
glee.
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