Our writing prompt today was “missing plane” as in Malaysian Airlines, Flight MH 370. Every Friday morning, I meet with a small group of talented writers. We agree on a topic, write for ten minutes and share our works.
A writer can create worlds and happy endings. My plane crashes in a rugged landscape. There are fistfights among the passengers as they follow a stream to an oasis. World politics escalate and military threats abound, until a heroic, if unlikely, rescue team is formed when a Zoroastrian, a mullah and a US Ranger walk into a kabob house, somewhere in that lost region of Eastern Iran.
In our writing session today I learned that we all feel incomplete until the fate of the plane is explained. After a week, theories about elves and movable Bermuda triangles seem as logical as the press reports of wreckage in the ocean, an inexplicable diversion, and a five-hour flight to nowhere.
We’re connected to this story by the universality of experience. We’ve all checked the phone for calls from travelers who should already be safe at home, waited for no-shows, or felt anxiety about a situation that is out of our control. We wait for a hopeful resolution with the families of these passengers. We are unsettled. We want the situation fixed, like when an correction in a sentence is needed, because the last words are