Departure Delay

He looks like a frog sitting there, a pinhead with an oversized jaw.  I expect his tongue to dart out between those thin lips any moment now.  No buzzing flies to tempt his appetite, I guess.

I wonder what the woman sitting next to him sees in him.  Maybe she’s a frog princess.  In this florescent lighting, her blond hair does resemble a mat of blue-green algae.

The next thing I know I’ll be seeing sprites under the seats.  There’s one now.  He’s going through her purse. What could he possibly want with her lipstick?

I know, the windows.  Yes, he could write on them in backwards print:   Help! Trapped by the security lines.  Airplane missing.  That won’t do—too long.  Maybe just a HELP!  We’ve been kidnapped or HELP!  Incompetent terrorists.  That should attract somebody’s attention.

The sprite must be reading my mind.  He’s crawling out into the aisle.  He’s standing up, and he’s wearing a disguise,  He looks like a three-year-old in his Spiderman T-shirt and baggy cargo pants, but I know better. I can see pointy ears under all that red hair.  There’s a grin on his face and mischief in his eyes

He turns for, oops, it’s not the windows.  He goes for the lily pad.  He wants the newspaper under the frog’s ample behind.  The frog croaks.  The frog princess supervises the extraction.

Maybe the sprite is going to write a message in red lipstick on the crumpled newsprint and hold it up to the window.  I’ll bet he is.  He must know the answer to the riddle: What is black and white and red all over? It’s our bruised and bleeding patience.

This is actually a Giant Toad
by Jeter Skeet