[Ed.Note: This week, we had a write-in vote for an alternate candidate in the voting. Frankly, I was both touched AND impressed by the email threatening me with physical harm and promising baked goods. So, to those of you silently talking to Silent Talkie, I say “Your wish is our command”.]
“Clementina…” Dale is holding her arms and looking her right in the eyes “… it is very likely that this plane is going to crash.” She gasps. “We must try to stay calm.”
Clementina shakes her head as though she’s waking from a deep sleep.
“We should belt ourselves in, shouldn’t we?” she says with a clarity of mind that can only be attributed to shock. So they do. Sitting side-by-side and hand-in-hand as the engine whines and the plane continues to lean sharply to one side.
“Dale… would you make me a promise?” she asks seriously, but not pleadingly.
“I hope so, but I can’t promise anything without knowing what it is first.”
“If we should make it out of this…”
“Yes?”
“I mean, if by some miracle we should survive…”
“…”
“I feel ridiculous even asking this, but given our situation-“
“-just ask!”
“Run away with me to the mountains of Costa Rica, where we can cast off the shackles of our modern world and live in paradise like Adam and Eve!”
“… uh…” Dale is speechless and caught off-guard.
“I read in TIME Magazine that the Nicaraguan Contras hide up there. We can keep a cache of weapons to fight them. It would be the honourable thing to do!”
“… uh…”
“Come to Central America with me… We can live the dream of getting back to the land AND of being freedom fighters!”
Dale immediately grasps the gravity of his situation… he is somewhere over the Eastern seaboard, in a crippled airplane… facing his own death; hand-in-hand with a woman who until moments ago, he was madly in love with, but whom he now understands is clearly insane. Still, with his death imminent, what has he got to lose?
Does Dale…
…agree to run away to fight the Contras?
…politely decline, and start to look for a way off the plane?
