The Death on the Skyport

Her death, it always puzzled me.

The skies were grey outside of Ken Mendenhall’s cobblestone home. He rested his head on his perched hand as he overlooked the bustling Victorian downtown from his small balcony nested on the hillside.

I saw her body fall from the sky port. It fell down thousands of feet as the whole town stood and watched. The shouts alerting everyone of the scene unfolding faded quickly into a horrified stillness.

At the time, no one knew why she fell. I stood there, just as everyone else, wondering why this poor woman took the fastest way down. I never actually saw her face. But I remember her limp body gracefully accepting its fate. Arms pointed towards the heavens, influenced by the wind and her downward movement.

Then, it happened. She was gone. No splatter on the pavement, no cries of anguish and horror. Just more silence. Silence that bridged the gap between the crowd below and the sky port above. The truest stillness I had ever heard. A moment of nothing sandwiched between either side of a cacophony of panic.

“Ken!” a nearby voice shouted as Ken’s head shot up from his desk, “Sleeping on the job, again?”

“You know I’ve been up all night on the case, get off my back,” Ken replied.

“Did you at least make any progress?”

“Progress? How do you make progress when there’s no bodies? No motives? No notes?” Ken replied, “I’m a detective dammit, not a miracle worker. I need something physical to go off. The database only has so much, and there’s no physical record of human’s disappearing from mid-air.”

Ken continued, “Let me go back to the dock, Rich. Maybe something will come to me.”

“Alright, there’s nothing else we can put you on anyway. The disappearance has the whole town in a frenzy, and frankly, it’s keeping most of the crime at bay. No one wants to be the next one to disappear,” Rich replied.

______

Ken grabbed his black trench coat and bowler hat from the coat rack before he crisply opened and shut the front door. He jogged down the skywalk, inhaling the disparate sections of clear air as he passed through them.

In this town, there were a few levels with cobblestone streets at the bottom, skywalk and Victorian corporate cityscape rising into the clouds, and a sky port gazing on it all from above. Each skywalk was connected by the meticulously crafted train tubes, faded but sturdy metal that each of the train cars hung from.

Boarding the next train, Ken buckled his seatbelt. Going from layer to layer of the city required a somewhat rapid and angled approach, much like the g-forces of taking off and landing on a plane but smooth and frictionless.

Most people in this timeline lost their fear of heights, much like Ken. He stepped from the sky dock onto the train, with a few inches between the dock and the train. Below that, hundreds of feet of air and the blurry town square, partially hidden by the top of an overcast sky.

Ken’s mind was mostly blank as he went through the motions, the ones he had taken at least 10 or 15 times before. Even without any evidence, the sky dock called to him. It begged his presence, looking at him from above as if searching for a lost loved one. He peered back at it, expecting it to meet his gaze, but was left only with the floating metal in the sky.

A man sat next to him before the train departed, and all Ken could think was, are you next? So many have gone missing, but none like that day. None off the platform that calls me.

The train took off skyward bound, narrowly missing so many of the blimps and flying boats that floated across the sky. As the train slowed and finally pulled to a stop, Ken departed and walked over to the edge of the dock - each foot tapping the floating metal surface and leaving a small echo in his ears.

Finally, I’m back with you again. Ken thought as his hand grazed the railing separating him from a perilous fall, and an unlikely savior.

It’s so different up here, basking in the sun’s rays and seeing the tops of the foggy sky – buildings peek through just enough to see the “ants” walking on the skywalk.

Is that what she felt when she fell? Or did she jump? Did she look down on the foggy sky that separates us from the heavens above just to realize that’s where we really belong? Born from dirt, to live in dirt. Our skies opened to us by those whose birthright was not of human flesh. Whose lives were not meant to live in the dirt and the rocks.

Just as Ken finished that thought, a gust of wind from one of the passing blimps washed his face with a cool breeze and it calmed him.

There’s so much we don’t know. We’ve been given so much, and yet, they promised they wouldn’t interfere. Even with our mistakes, even with our deaths, senseless as they may be. So, if her death isn’t because of them, then who? Is she even dead?

Clack, clack, clack went the sounds of a heeled loafer on the metal dock. He turned, shocked to see the man who was next to him on the train running at him with full force. A pale skinned, wired frame man running towards Ken and the railing.

“Stop! Don’t do this! You won’t come back, no one has!” Ken yelled at the man as he passed Ken, jumping and landing his shoe on the railing to steady his jump into the unknown.

As the man fell, he yelled back at Ken, “Why does God choose to save the ants? If he doesn’t save me, that means that I am like him!”

His voice trailed off as he fell further from the platform. Tears came to Ken’s eyes as he thought, Why didn’t I stop him? I could have grabbed him. I could have stood in his way. Whatever this is, whoever it is, they are playing God with us. Tricking our mentally wounded into leaps of faith to determine their worth.

Ken was pulled away from his thoughts as he saw a panic in the town square. Standing up from his seat and moving toward the edge of the balcony, he peered down from the sky dock. The shouts from the crowd fainty reached his ears.

Did he make it to the ground? Or did God save him like one of the ants. So small and fragile to look at from above, he can’t help but pity us.

That’s when they started to fall. Appearing from what seemed like an opening in the sky itself, bodies fell from around 100 feet to the bricks of the city center. The rip in the sky blinked in and out of existence, appearing in different locations over the city. With each blink, another body fell.

I’m heading to town. I have to see for myself. Is she there, standing in the crowd once more?

With the train operators unaware of the panic, he was lucky enough to grab the last seat on a train with a direct route from the sky dock to the cobblestone walkways below.

I have to see it.

Once again, he buckled his seatbelt and heard the train doors close. However, this time, he didn’t look at the person next to him. Afraid of the curse that he brought onto that man, the call of the sky dock brought him nothing but sorrow.

As he reached downtown, it happened. He pushed his way forward through the crowd, hoping to catch a glimpse of what he observed from his balcony as a booming voice consumed the onlookers, “We have taken these bodies as a sacrifice from the people of your time. They were captured on their way towards death, to live another life in our time, and to be sent back again.”

Peering down for a moment, he saw the shattered body of an elderly man on the pavement.

The voice continued, “We took these beings on their way to death and gave them a new life. Look at the streets below, none of them are the same as when they fell. They lived; they thrived in our time. Bringing us relics of the past and being relics themselves. They were celebrated and content. As they gracefully aged past the point of no return, we collected and brought them back here to finish what they started. We were not their saviors, they were ours - saving an advanced civilization from population collapse.”

Murmurs from the crowed echoed between the builds and into the surrounding shops, “How could this be possible? I knew one of them, she wasn’t on her way out.”

Then, in a flash, the voice disappeared. Ken decided to wait around a while and examine the bodies to see if he recognized anyone from the missing persons unit. Of course, they would all be categorized and tagged by the watchmen, but if he helped find a few they’d give him 100 credits each.

As he looked through the bodies, he noticed a woman standing underneath a lamppost. It wasn’t quite dark, since the watchmen hadn’t arrived, but it was dark enough that the shadows concealed her face.

Pausing for moment, Ken approached the woman and said, “Hey, you should get inside before the watchmen get here. You’ll get a fine if you’re out after dark.”

She stood underneath the lamp motionless, and Ken repeated, “Hello?”

“I waited for you, Ken. At the sky port,” the woman replied.

Ken stepped closer.

She continued, “They told me that you were going to show up. They told me you felt that call too. That we were the only ones, connected by our calling.”

Ken took another step and noticed that the woman was elderly but dressed to conceal it.

“I spent so much time up there, waiting for you. They told me that we had a connection. But after so long, I couldn’t stand waiting. I couldn’t stand them telling me what to do. So, I jumped. I jumped anticipating an end to my torment. But then they took me. They took me as I watched the Heavens grow brighter in my decent.”

Ken took a half step closer, reached out his hand and softly said, “I’m here now. We’re not at the sky port, but we are together.”

Through tears, she put her hand in his palm and responded, “They told me they were sending us back, but they didn’t tell us how. I lived my whole life in there, without you but always thinking of you. They imprinted that damned sky port in my brain. I don’t even understand why. Why did they choose me, Ken? I just wanted to know what was waiting for me. I wanted to know what was so important about you.”

“Maybe the only thing that was important was our shared understanding of that place. An inarticulable piece of ourselves,” Ken replied, applying slight pressure to her hand for added reassurance.

“But why me?” She replied weakly.

The voice that was once booming in the city center returned with a much softer pitch, seemingly speaking only to the two of them, “We are bound to share, if nothing else, a piece of ourselves with another. If we are lucky, they’ll share a piece of themselves in return. In that moment of recognition and surrender, we find ourselves. We find them at the top of the sky port and in the city streets. Whether they are found in a fleeting moment or whether they last a lifetime, they’ll always be a part of us – never to be forgotten.”

As the voice finished, the woman collapsed. Ken caught her as she fell but as her face was revealed by the light, he knew she was gone. Only allowed this final conversation as a moment of closure.