Demon Stories

Josephine: Jet Set, 1963, Skyway

Josephine

Jet Set

1963, Skyway

"You eye-talian?" 

I looked up from my magazine and slowly looked to my right. The man seated next to the window beside me was looking at me with a smile I knew all too well from men who wore it everywhere.

"No, sir, I'm French," I said, turning a page and focusing back on the article about Kennedy's assassination just barely a month earlier.

The man did not take my signal to stop talking. He leaned over, pretending to read the article with me. He spoke again. "I guess I ain't meeting my Sophia Loren on this flight. Too bad. I would have liked to spend my time in Rome with a pretty redhead."

"Hm," I responded, not looking at him.

I could sense him smiling without looking up. "Hey, anybody ever tell you that you look like Sophia Loren? Its uncanny." 

I had to chuckle at this. The man's grin widened at my response. 

"Someone has told you, huh? I'm not surprised," he said. He settled back in his seat, satisfied with this exchange. I finally honestly looked over at him, and was met with the image of an older gentleman with thinning white hair and fading looks. He must have been quite handsome in his day.

The loudspeaker came on before either of us could say another word. "Hello, welcome to Pan Am. We have some safety procedures to go over. If you would kindly look to the front of your cabin, we will demonstrate these procedures for you."

My eyes had gone wide from the word "hello". I whipped my head up from my magazine to the front of the cabin. What they met confirmed my fears and my face immediately became hotter than the man's libido next to me.

Up front, very familiar inky black, tightly curled hair was wrapped in a smart chingnon, and a finely muscled and trim yet voluptuous body was needlessly girdled and dressed in the famous blue and white Pam Am uniform. The devastatingly pretty woman holding the phone for the loudspeaker in her white gloved hand was speaking with neutrally lipsticked lips and wore cat tipped eyes made expertly with black eyeliner which brought out how purely green they were. 

She looked so much like her father I almost had a heart attack. I do every time. My own gloved hand went over my heart anyway in the unexpectedness of seeing her here. Of all the people in the world, we had to bump into each other. But then my heart told me no. I wanted to gulp but that is unladylike. I wanted to gulp away this fear caused by my demon heart knowing that the only reason why we should meet like this was because she meant for it to happen. Our meeting like this was no coincidence at all.

I wanted to jump out of the emergency window.

"Hey, I don't know why they gotta go over these safety procedures. I just wanna fly already, you know?"