Missed flights, mysterious midnight connections, strange souvenirs, security checks gone wrong.
Let’s come up with a bunch of “airport story” ideas, then write some short stories together!
During the last stream, a subscriber requested that we write a story that involved an airport.
Watch the process here, or scroll down for what we wrote.
Chat voted that we write this idea: You go into the bathroom at one airport and come out of it in a different airport.
And here’s what we came up with:
When I walked into the bathroom at Boston Logan Airport and came out of it at LAX, at first I had no idea anything had changed. You know how airports all look the same, right? White walls, white ceilings, children running like little demons and slathering their kid-goo over everything, non-offensive muzak playing over the radio. It even smells the same: like every inch has been sanitized with ammonia to kill anything interesting.
As a custom toilet-paper salesman, a proud employee of Poop Prints, I travel a lot and I’ve seen a lot of airports. It’s kind of funny, the trends that certain regions have. The east coast loves its animal prints, while the west coast has its spouse-print fetish, it seems. I don’t know why you’d want to wipe your ass with your wife’s face, but hey, they’re paying my salary, so I keep my mouth shut.
It wasn’t until I got into the lobby and looked out the windows, expecting to see the cloudy Boston skyline that I thought something was up. The sky was too bright, the sun was too hot, and the screen showing upcoming flights had some listed with Logan as their destination point.
I stopped in my tracks and looked around. There were no Red Sox posters or duck banners, just pictures of palm trees, flowers and sunshine, with a giant sign reading “Los Angeles International Airport.”
Somehow, between the time of me taking a piss and pretending to wash my hands, I’d jumped across the country.
Resisting the urge to scream, I took my phone out of my pocket with shaking hands to check the time. I’d landed in Boston at 4:05pm, and now it was 4:07. I’d never been too good at math, but even I knew that was probably not possible. Or maybe it was precisely because I didn’t really believe in math in the first place that I was able to do it.
I still had half an hour before my meeting, so I trucked it back to the bathroom to see if I could make it happen again. Enter stall, piss vapor into bowl, neglect to flush, run water and rub dry hands together above it, then exit the bathroom with my roller-luggage in tow.
Bam. I was no longer in LAX, but back in Logan. Complete with cherry blossom posters, vending machines everywhere, signs written in Japanese.
Wait a minute. Looking around, this place was suspiciously clean for an American airport. I followed the groups of people over the moving walkways, still full of children smacking their slimy hands over the handrail, until we got to the lobby.
Haneda Airport in Japan. That’s where I was. Listen. I failed fifth grade math. Once they started introducing letters into math, it was all over for me. But even I knew that you couldn’t just jump from California to Japan like that.
Unless you had access to a magic bathroom like me.
I made a dozen trips in and out of that bathroom, each time appearing in a new airport. Chicago O’Hare, Dubai International, Beijing Capital, Heathrow, Phoenix, even Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower that only had four flights a day.
All I could do was stand there in awe. Other people went in and out of the bathroom, clearly not teleporting between continents like I was. For some reason, only I had the power to do this.
And that meant only I had the power to monetize it!
Business started slow. At first, no one believed me. Getting someone to follow you into the bathroom so they can confirm that you “disappear” is just about as hard as you’d think it is. The only person who was willing to do it was my boss Sal, after I dragged him into the Logan airport bathroom saying I had an idea to strike a sweet airport toilet paper contract.
Just as he started railing on me for not washing my hands, I exited the bathroom and popped into Long Beach Airport. It took another fifty trips to finally make it back to Boston, but when I did, Sal was waiting with police officers after telling them I’d gone missing hours ago. I just smiled and presented him with fifty brochures from all the different airports that I’d snatched, then sat him down and watched his hair curl into money signs as I told him what I could do.
Maybe it was my imagination, but a few of the pamphlets slipped out of my fingers toward the end of our conversation. It almost seemed like their tips were flatter than they’d used to be.
From there, it was just a matter of getting the word out. Sal had me delivering Poop Prints all over the world, upping my salary to make up for never needing to pay for an airplane ever again.
I may not have been able to control exactly where I went each time, but with enough customers it didn’t really matter: every destination had a Poop Prints delivery.
But it wasn’t long before others found out mine and Sal’s little secret, and it exploded. Suddenly there were reporters waiting outside every airport bathroom in the world, barraging me with questions. Not to mention businessmen pushing past each other to hand me their cards and take advantage of my shipping services.
Being a teleporting celebrity was fun at first. Getting asked the same questions about how I was doing it, and saying I had no idea was kind of cool for the first thousand times. Then I started enjoying the quiet of being in the bathroom stalls, the only privacy I had anymore, looking at the business cards and the drool-inducing numbers written for me on their backs.
I had to hold the card between my pointer and middle finger though, since my thumb was missing from the nail up.
Before I knew it, I wasn’t just shipping Poop Prints anymore. I was a full-blown transportation sensation. Bottles of wine, fresh fruits and vegetables, important sealed documents, jewelry, even thick wads of cash. Plus a bunch of airport souvenir-food for some weirdo who only eats boxes of gift shop grub. I didn’t care though; anything that I could fit in my luggage or backpack was fair game, especially when my pockets were getting more filled with wads of cash of their own by the day.
Though it was getting harder to stuff the bills in there. Both of my thumbs were gone now, and I was missing the other fingers from the middle-joints up. Thankfully I had a pair of gloves to hide them and stuff the tips with paper towels, so I could keep doing deliveries.
It just got faster and more efficient. There were no more reporters now, just crates of merchandise waiting to be delivered outside of each bathroom. Security officers roped off the area as onlookers took photos of me with their cameras, ready to brag online about having seen the real-life Air-porter himself.
I tried to smile for some of their photos, but it was hard. My lips had slowly vanished a week ago, and I wore a surgical mask to cover them up. Still, I could smile with my eyes as I picked up another crate and brought it back into the bathroom. Hopefully no one noticed that my stuffed-glove fingers didn’t move, since now all I had were stumps ending at my elbows.
Honestly, I had no more of an idea about why I was slowly coming apart than why I could pop between airports in the first place. Maybe it had something to do with how fast I was going between places, speed of relativity or theory of light or something like that. All I knew was even though my body was disappearing, my bank account was fatter than ever! And hey, I’d always meant to lose some weight anyway.
The only sucky part was when my feet started to go. Unlike my arms where I could still forklift packages, there wasn’t much I could do if I couldn’t walk. First my toes, then my feet, until I was thumping around on stumps shoved into meaningless shoes. I wasn’t sure if the stacks of crates to deliver had grown higher, or if I’d just grown shorter.
Finally, I fell on my face during a delivery, and I couldn’t get up. I only had legs up to my knees, and even my arms were little more than knobs. Thankfully, one of the security officers picked me up and plopped me in his backpack, then grabbed the crate himself. He did the same ritual I’d performed more than a hundred thousand times at this point, and then we popped into existence a thousand miles away, ready for more deliveries.
I’m not sure why he was able to be transported with me, maybe it was because he was basically just something that I was transporting? I don’t know, but I was super thankful to not have to carry the crates myself anymore. Just strapped to the officer’s back, I could work whatever magic I had, and leave the labor to him.
The officers would pass me around, wearing me on their back like scuba gear. I thanked them and tried to make smalltalk, but they never really spoke back, so it didn’t really matter when my mouth finally vanished and I couldn’t say anything anymore.
My backpack got more advanced and cooler the more I disintegrated. When my arms and legs were completely gone, I got a neat little leather pouch to sit in, complete with buckles and straps for safety. I wished that I could smell it, but my nose had long disappeared. At least I didn’t have ears anymore, so I never had to hear that awful airport muzak again!
Then my eyes started to go. Little by little, each day, my vision got darker and blurrier. I was little more than a head at that point, strapped to an officer’s back as they tossed me to each other at the airports. Losing my vision was kind of a good thing, I guess, since being swung around made me a little nauseous. When everything finally went black, it was kind of a relief.
Although, it’s been a while in the blackness. I don’t know how many years I did the transporting, I lost count after the first couple, but I feel like if I’d kept disappearing at the same rate, I should be completely gone by now. No more head, brain, nothing.
And to be fair, there is nothing. No sights, smells, feelings at all. If they’re still using me to transport stuff, that’s awesome, but I’d like to know. Or, if I’m dead, I’d like to know that too.
I’d really like to know.
Please. Please, can you tell me?
Be sure to check out the video for a dramatic reading, as well as a bit of the process for how it got written.
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you join us on Twitch.
And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel or watch the full stream reruns.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons
