The Penguin

The 10 words from Kelli :
lift, Frankfurt, open, clamber, penguin, dim, jigger, brazen, poach, whistle.

"Who the fuck are you?" he says, staring at the mirror. The frustrated anger and the despair lift his brow in a chaos of conflicting lines; his brain feels like it's been poached.
He hears a disembodied voice telling him to go back to his seat. As he opens the door, a turbulence sends him flying (as well as the content of one of the passengers' coffee cup) across the aisle. The sudden pain in his thigh as he crashes on an armrest takes his mind off his introspection for a moment.

He unscrews the miniature bottle of alcohol he stole off the trolley on his way to the toilets (yes, he could have asked for it, it's free after all, but the staff on the flights to Frankfurt always terrify him) and swallows its jigger as he dives back in his inner thoughts, losing his eyes in the cottonwool sea.
He hums himself a tune to the brazen roaring of the reactors; something his dad used to whistle when he was a child eating cloudberries back in Maine.

What is he doing with his life? when and where did he lose track of what he really needed? Five years ago, the first time he was sent to Frankfurt, he had thought: that's it, I'm quitting, that's not what I want to do with myself, I deserve better. And there he was, on his way to Frankfurt again, hating himself for having become that numb shadow of a human being.

As the plane clambers above the winds, he sinks deeper into bitterness.

He looks inside his wallet. Look at that, he thinks; there's nobody close enough to my heart that I would carry their photo with me. Just credit card receipts and an old coupon for a meal for two for the price of one from a restaurant he has nobody to take to. And an out-of-date condom.

But it has a penguin on it, he thinks with a dim smile.


10 words for Kelli: abstraction, willpower, peach, life, Simon, bag, desire, animal, urgency, lewd.