Every wrecked window of the fallen airplane contained a different story. The story that interested me existed at the front of the plane. Or it would have, if the crash hadn’t shorn the cockpit windows clean off when it plowed the plane’s nose into the ground.

I stood on the spine of a once-white, narrow-body airliner. Fire had gutted the insides black sometime before the crash and the elements had scoured the company logo from the outside sometime after. If I squinted, the hulk appeared as some great beached marine creature with too many eyes or mouths, crouched here on the shore. The tide could not budge it and the locals had no use for this particular spit of black sand, so here it remained.

Damp from a chill, clinging fog soaked my shirtfront as I stretched lengthwise on the forward end, head and arms hanging over the ragged edge of ripped metal, leaving the cockpit open to the skies. Dangling upside down like this shifted my perspective — the roar of breakers became the death rattle of compromised engines; wind whistling through exposed wiring grew into the screams of doomed passengers.

I squeezed my eyes shut. I knew the real story ended in passengers, attendants, and pilots parachuting to safely. What I heard in my mind was what might have been. Because somehow the pilots had angled the plane to land successfully on this beach, everyone would have lived anyway.

The empty cavity of the cockpit looked meaningfully back at me.
Well… Everyone except the pilots, apparently.

I rolled over onto my back to ease the blood rushing to my head and patted the plane’s metallic hide with a hollow clank. This plane had no voice to speak to me, but I heard its story all the same.

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