Sophie's Folly
/
Image via Pexels.
Seated at the airport bar, Moira glances down at the red suitcase beside her barstool. It had been a gift from her sister from, back when Moira gone off to school. She had been seventeen 17 and eager to leave home in the scenic middle of nowhere, never to look back. Sophie had been 12. She’d cried on the day Moira left. A lot.
That had been, what, 10 years ago now? Long enough that the red suitcase isn’t quite as bright as it was back then. Long enough that Sophie isn’t so little anymore, long enough that she’s getting married in a week.
Moira has been hauling around that red suitcase ever since. After ten years, she can’t look at the suitcase without thinking about her little sister. Though, honestly, her sister is just about the very last thing she wants to think about right now.
The first thing Moira is going to do when she gets home, she decides, is smack her sister.
This whole mess is Sophie’s fault. Sure, Sophie didn’t ask her boyfriend to finally propose to her. She didn’t ask for all this thunder and lighting and rain falling sideways.
But Sophie did ask Moira to fly out. “It’ll be faster!” she insisted. “And fun! You love planes!”
But planes don’t fly when there’s lightning, so Moira has spent the past few hours drowning her sorrows and silently cursing her sister.
“My sister’s getting married,” she sullenly, and not entirely soberly, tells the bartender.
“Yeah?” he answers, at least feigning interest.
She nods. “Yeah. I’m supposed to be flying out for her bachelorette party. But I’m going to miss it, because of this damn storm.”
Screw the weather. Screw the airport.
Screw the Wright Brothers.
Moira reaches for her glass. As she downs the contents, she glances over her shoulder at the flight board. She mutters a curse into her glass when she sees the message staring starkly back at her:
Flight cancelled.
Moira sets down her glass and reaches for the red suitcase.
“Screw this,” she decides with finality, pushing herself away from the bar. “I’ll take the train.”
Joel Balkovec
Joel doesn’t usually write about airports. He usually writes about pirates under the name J.B. Norman. Check him out at www.realmgard.com. He’d love to tell you more, but he’s too busy looking off to the right.
