Rodney Sanches
Extra Baggage Fee
She invented a gravity appliance so she could bring more baggage when she travelled. Her bags always looked heavy in a flat sided, hard wooden box but when placed on the airport scale registered a startlingly low mass.
The appliance used the mass of her clothes and furniture and the rest of her flat to create a tiny pool of gravity in the core of her possessions, they hovered, the bag hovered, she paid no extra fee.
When security looked inside they saw a large marble on what they always mistook for velvet and x-rays were often tricked into revealing nothing at all.
One day flying over Barcelona there was sudden turbulence and the beach umbrella slid into the guitar amplifier pushing the flat screen television into the wardrobe. The flat screen TV was never supposed to go into the wardrobe.
Balancing her items was very, very important. While she had invented pools of gravity for her things, she didn’t get around to stabilising the gravity from accumulating. It was on a list she had stuck to the fridge with a magnet the shape of a strawberry.
It happened with a soft crinkle, the plane folded into the sturdy box and then a cloud as the bag fell from the sky, then a bird and finally much of Spain was stuffed into her now crowed flat.
The passengers were uniformly upset now that the planet was gone and all that was left was a small suitcase orbiting the sun and tapas.
I hate tapas said a traveller under his breath sitting on a beriveted aluminium panel.
She felt the weight of the passengers and crews anger and some of her own guilt under their glares, but she was busy and then turned back to the work of protecting the stickers covering the suitcase from the solar wind.