Spider Man

"We are cruising at an altitude of 35,000 feet." My cue. I head down the aisle. Whenever I tell someone I am a male flight attendant they nod their head, seguii using "so" and jerk the wheel of conversation to spare me the mortification. The reaction is understandable. People fear and despise the timelessness of the airplane. There is nowhere to go up in the air. No progress your life can make. No faults to fill in as you float suspended above the conceptual network of time. Maybe the temporary escape from so absorptive a system inítially attracted me. But as the 3rd party outsider to any human interaction aboard the plane, I found myself with power. And as Uncle Ben, the paternal figure in my favorite comic said "With great power comes great responsibility." So I swing from web to web, observing the flies bound by small slips of paper, and spin my social web as they wait to drop back into time. I continue slowly down the aisle and look to either side. Two teenagers sit next to eachother in aisle 17. They are boy and girl, and from the way they silently dance around the shared armrest I can tell they are strangers. The boy's bag intrudes on the girl's foot space and with the intrusion comes an opportunity to spin my web. I check the girl's behavior to make sure she notices the bag, and the boy appears oblivious. Perfect. "Excuse me sir." I say with a facade of politeness and contrition. "You're only allowed one space for your bag." "It's for the benefit of the passenger" I say with a pointed look at the girl. And with the finishing touch I walk to the back of the cabin to watch the flies wriggle. From my vantage point I see the boy tuck his arm in awkwardly from the armrest as a gesture of appeasement, and steal glances to his left. He knows she has a tendency to keep her displeasure under the radar. The bag was proof of that. And longer he stews in his own head the more his resentment grows. The only thing he knows about this girl is that she silently disapproves of everything he does. The plane begins to descend, and time flows back into the plane making the flies restless. The boy stuffs his carry-on bag roughly and stares out the window broodingly. I go into the bathroom and chuckle evilly to myself. If he only knew how I played him. If he only knew whose web it was that bound him.