1998 Chicago, IL (Midway) to Benton Harbor, MI

Halloween was three months early, but monsters never hunt or haunt by calendar. The horde’s agency, sometimes, is the weather. Deceptive. Until the sky grows teeth. My Stormscope registers twenty strikes. It’s a low, distant growl —the kind of monster you keep an eye on but don’t fear... until the green screen mutates; a dormant, Frankenstein-stitched-together beast suddenly receives a million volts of unholy electricity. Five hundred seventy bolts now terrorize the sky, with me in it. My plane is in desperate retreat. But there’s no place to go. South Bend Approach scrambles to find a path through the chaos, vectors the single-engine aircraft out over the black void of Lake Michigan. No flotation gear. The water below is an executioner waiting for an engine cylinder to fail, or a crash of lightning to smash my plexiglass shield, or a wing to snap.
Gray clouds, a gothic vampire; the air, slowly draining hope from my veins. The cockpit shrinks to a coffin as the Piper Archer II zigzags through a labyrinth avoiding the shape-shifting minotaur. An entire cast of monstrosities has filled the sky to eat away at my odds of escape. First, a turbulent Michael Myers in the backseat, silent and heavy, methodically trying to tear the yoke from my hands. I’m trapped in a dark room with a relentless killer. Scraps of dense clouds wrap my plane’s fuselage, as
a vengeful mummy binding my airplane in wet heavy layers. My plane is now a suffocating tomb, clawing to remain at five thousand feet. I have flown straight into the mouth of leviathan. Where are my guardian angels to guide me through tornado-spawning cumulonimbus, beneath the bruising weight of mammatus clouds, and avoid the metal-mangling of its teeth?

The dark sky belongs to the pretender:

   Whose laughter rends the screaming heavens?
   Stiff wings bōw in penance through nebulous clouds.

   Through nebulous clouds, stiff wings bōw and bend,
   while the engine coughs like the caw of a lost crow.

   A plaintive caw of a lost crow in the cold drench,
   where an angry god spits from a darkening sky.

   From the darkening sky, eyes flash lightning,
   thunder clapping in sassy, impudent approval.

   Sassy impudence denies the God of Genesis,
   seeking the other one hiding in the storm.

   The other one cross-dresses as a glittering snake,
   slithering out on a manic acid trip.

   A snake on a toxic, acid trip with slashing fangs—
   whose laughter echoes as he bends the metal birds.

Crow on a Branch, c. 1887.

Kawanabe Kyōsai, Crow on a Branch, c. 1887. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain.