Finally the wheels of the gargantuan Boeing 767 were back on the runway. The plane was late. The passengers were furious, their faces tinged a sharp red, derived directly from a devilish mix of displeasure and the absence of any sort of circulation for the past 21 hours. A mumbled and ingenuous 'Welcome to Chicago' purred from scratchy speakers above, once in English and then again in Russian. The Captain's monotonous explanation that it was 'not yet safe to remove your seat belt', was ignored completely as the un-clicking and un-buckling in the back cabin rebelled against his somewhat turbulently tainted cockpit authority.
When the plane came to a stop at C14, a scurried frenzy of commotion began. As everyone around him bustled through overhead bins and checked their pockets for phones and wallets, Jeff remained motionless in the sophistication of his business class seat. He stared aimlessly out of his window at the ground staff surrounding the plane. They were moving stiffly through the snow-mixed wind, bundled under layers of heavy coats, hats and over-sized mittens. One man, possibly a woman (it was difficult to tell), was waving flashing orange sticks towards the front of the plane in some rhythmically premeditated pattern. Jeff realized he was staring but thought there was no way the he-she glow stick bearer would ever know. Plus, in his somewhat drunken state, he didn't really care. Jeff was 4 hours late, had undoubtedly missed all of the connections to Minneapolis, and, just 6 days before, had met the most beautiful girl he'd ever know... and left her in Moscow.
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