Delayed fright – Notes From The Boneyard

We emerge from the ether. Us Boneyard lot. There are four of us cramped at headquarters right now, tapping and scribbling away.

This can be beneficial for the lazy writer such as I.

Sometimes, a Boneyard article is written while I sleep.

And I don’t mean by my own slumbering paw.

I mean, sometimes I wake, and it has been written at 4am in a text frenzy, while the accidental author awaits a delayed plane that may never arrive.

It’s usually myself, and more recently Pieta and Howe, who regale you with tales of wow and terror from the road, while Chris Coll handles the sketching.

But, we’ve flipped the scenario this week, and we three stayed in the cellar while Chris went gallivanting.

And while we were reversing roles, we went all out, and took the dirty deed of the illustration.

The results were astounding.

So, here it is, straight from the front lines of the treacherous road.

Or sky.

Presently representing the Boneyard to present our present to you all, we pleasantly present…

‘Delayed Fright’ by Chris Coll

I was led, like one of many dogs being shuffled into the animal-control van; none of us fully aware of whether this whole charade is good or bad.

I find myself surrounded by emotionally-drenched strangers, every one a different story of escape, of new life, of reunion and old connections, old reflections.

The whole airport sideshow is a bizarre theatre of the human condition; the mime-artist’s trick-bag, Lon Chaney’s gallery of masks…

Every emotion known to man in the hellish swamp of tears and sunshine.

And yet, it’s clinical and dead; like a dentist’s office, or Dave Bowman’s snow-white bedroom at the far end of the universe.

It doesn’t feel real.

It has the feeling of an alien’s attempt to convince their abductees that all’s fine, and they’re still on Earth.

All the essentials are present: Tlhe stores, the bars, the music, the bustling crowds – but it’s tinged with fakery, almost as though, if you were to pay closer attention to the passing strangers, you’d discover them to be nothing more than lifeless mannequins on wheels.

The whole affair a kind-of eerie graveyard of reality.

You search for distraction, so, inevitably, the departure screen becomes your god – and amid the whole endless puppet show of it all, you watch that screen with the same breath-trapping tension of a desperate man down to his last penny, staring from under a sweat-clad brow as his last-hope horse stumbles before the finish line.

Then, you’re hit with your very own stumbling horse: The delays are announced. Those last 30 seconds until your gate is declared become an hour, two hours… Next Christmas.

No explanation.

Your only option is to jump back on to the morbid merry-go-round of meaningless distraction once again.

Browse the same books you saw five times already, buy trash magazines you don’t want, and junk food you can’t handle.

Stare slack-jawed at big heavenly posters advertising trips to places you’ll, seemingly, never get to
visit.

Pint after sickening pint; all soundtracked with the incoherent garble of robotic flight announcements.

You begin to wonder if you’ll ever escape.

Your brain begins to hit you with theories you don’t want to hear: Is this whole thing a set-up?

A ploy to get me trapped in this soulless movie-set of society; every suitcase-dragging traveller just another actor on the payroll of
some faceless figure grinning
behind the scenes, pulling all the strings.

Your mind finally cracks, and just like Bowman in that awful room, you see a vision of yourself.

Much, much older.. And still at the airport.

Drifting off on some rainy black night into your final sleep, before departure into the netherworld, only to be put on eternal hold due to flight conflicts heading to limbo, purgatory and Birmingham.

So, you wait in an endlessly murmuring, ghost-stepped, elevator-music bar, drinking a flat pint that will not empty, reading breakfast menus that seem to rise in price with every dry-eyed blink, and watching a departure screen that endlessly flashes, next to your destination, the words: ‘Is this really where you thought it would all end?’.