Halloween “Tropes” CONTEST WINNER
You arrived before dawn, but the clocks say otherwise. The airport is too quiet for the crowd inside it. Everyone moves, but no one boards. A child cries into a stuffed rabbit. A woman in a suit eats half a sandwich, then rewraps it with shaking hands.
Your flight has been delayed.
Not weather. Not mechanical. Just an update in fifteen minutes that drips across the monitor like blood pooling under the skin. Then another. Then another.
Outside, no planes land. None depart. The sky glows with a strange yellow that might mean storm delays.
No one remembers what city they were headed to. You try to ask, but your voice echoes wrong—too loud, like someone else’s mouth wearing your teeth. Everyone’s face is too still. Too smooth.
You go to the Hudson News for water. The bottles are there but no one rings you up. You drink anyway. It tastes like the air before lightning strikes. You leave a ten on the counter, just in case someone’s watching.
They call final boarding for a flight with no destination. No gate. No one moves.
A child cries in the corner; except it’s not a child. Just the sound. You look and find no mouth, just hands curled like petals, twitching in patterns you almost understand. Like the codes in the lights above the exit signs. Like the flicker of CNN anchors with no pupils, just white static where their eyes should be.
You try to leave. You follow the signs toward Baggage Claim, toward Ground Transportation, but every corridor feeds back into the same terminal. The same TSA agent who won’t meet your gaze. The same dead sparrow by the trash can.
Your phone says it’s 4:44. It has said that for hours.
You sit. You wait.
You don’t remember arriving. Your phone has no signal. The boarding pass in your hand is printed with a name you don’t recognize, though the seat number is yours. The woman beside you is wearing your coat. She says nothing. You don’t ask.
Above you, the fluorescent lights buzz like flies. You try not to look at the windows. Outside the glass, the planes have teeth now. Not turbines.
You were going somewhere once. You’re sure of it. Weren’t you?
Your guilt travels lighter than you do. It comes in fragments: a text left unread, a voice you couldn’t call back, a hand you let go too quickly at the hospice. You watch the automatic walkway run on a loop with no one riding it, and you think, this is penance. This is mercy, drawn out like static. A slow forgetting.
You follow signs, though none of them say where they lead. “Restrooms,” “Shuttle to Gates,” “No Exit.” The arrows contradict each other. You turn left, then right, then left again and find yourself at a dead end of vending machines and a single payphone.
The courtesy phone rings.
You don’t answer.
You wait a long time. It rings again.
Behind you, a janitor is mopping the same square of floor over and over again. You try to ask her a question, but her badge says Evacuation Only. She doesn’t look up.
A voice over the intercom announces Flight 717, Final Boarding. But there are no gates here. Just a row of gray chairs bolted to the floor and a digital screen blinking static.
You sit. Someone joins you. Not beside you—just nearby. A woman, maybe. Hard to say with her coat pulled tight and her face shadowed. You think she’s crying, but when you look again, she’s smiling with her teeth pressed together like she’s holding something in.
Behind the static screen, something shifts. Something large.
You rise, and your legs feel too thin, too long, like borrowed limbs. When you look back, the woman is gone.
The phone rings again. You answer it. Not because you want to. Because there is nothing else left to do. The receiver is slick with something cold. Not wet exactly, but old—like it remembers weather.
“Hello?” you ask, but the word echoes back as Help.
The voice that responds is yours, almost. Worn thin, brittle at the edges.
“You missed your flight.”
A flicker. A pulse. The screen above the gate clears for just a second. You see an image—your own seat, empty. A tray table folded. A drink unopened. A window that looks onto nothing but sky.
The janitor is gone. The lights overhead strobe once, then hold steady.
You ask, “Can I still make it?”
“No,” your voice replies. Then quieter: “But you’re already here.”
Click.
You sit. You wait.
From the corridor, footsteps approach. Slow, deliberate. Someone whistling the tune from the boarding chime. It stops just behind you.
You do not turn around. You think of everyone you forgot to call back. You think of a hand you should’ve held longer.
Overhead, the screen changes again. Your name, blinking in red.
They call your flight. You stand, but no one else does.
The gate agent smiles too widely. His teeth look like the barcode from your ticket. “Right on time,” he says, though you never told him your name.
As you walk down the jet bridge alone, you feel like you’re being born into something old.
Betty Stanton (she/her) is a Pushcart nominated writer who lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals and collections and has been included in various anthologies. She received her MFA from The University of Texas – El Paso and holds a doctorate in Educational Leadership. She is currently on the editorial board of Ivo Review. @fadingbetty.bsky.social
Published 10/30/25