An old man in a faded blue tuxedo sipped loudly from his iced latte, made to order with extra shots of peppermint and raspberry syrup. He was sitting at one of the tiny tables nearest to the stand with creamers and napkins, just outside of a corporate coffee kiosk. Most people marching past were pulling luggage or far deep into their own headspace, but the folks seated across the terminal at Gate B10 were starting to give him dirty looks. He swiped right on the tablet propped up on his table, flipping to the next video in his playlist of World War II dogfight videos and Hollywood plane crashes.
A small child in a shirt that read My First Flight pulled her hand from her father’s grasp and stopped to watch a helicopter spiral out of control. Her father continued on, engrossed in his phone. Mother was pulling all the luggage and craning her neck in search of the gate announcement boards. The child approached the condiments stand and reached up, barely able to extend her hands over the edge of the top. She turned to the old man and said. “Excuse me, do you know if there is any more sugar-free sweetener up there?”
The old man laughed and crossed his legs, dangling a rainbow-colored plastic clog from his raised foot. He calmly said, “I’m sorry, your voice is pitched too high for me to understand you. Where is your momma, momma?” He flipped to another video. A hot air balloon festival drifted towards a wind farm.
The girl climbed into an uncomfortably-shaped metal chair in the empty table next to the old man. She folded her hands together on the cold tabletop and stared at her fists. After a brief loop of a cartoon white dog piloting his red doghouse with a gangsta rap soundtrack, the old man turned his tablet off. The girl said, “Report.”
The old man straightened his bowtie. “Sir, you know that I would not call this meeting if it were not –”
The girl pulled on both pigtails and kicked her feet back and forth. “Operative, I said report!”
The old man removed one of his clogs and slapped it on the table. He yelled, “I will not be spoken to like this!” Anyone watching their tables a moment ago had found something else to occupy their attention. He leaned over towards the girl and half-whispered. “Sir, I would not break the normal protocols, if not for a dire turn of fortune. Recent intelligence gathering is rather incontrovertible. Sir.”
The girl grabbed a napkin from his table. “What are you on about?”
“Weird is out, sir.” He replaced his footwear.
“Elaborate,” she said.
“Do you not attend to their news reports? Local politics in this region have begun to associate weird with one party, sir.” He slurped more coffee.
“It is the quadrennial mud-slinging season, no? Hold on.” The girl rolled her eyes and nodded behind him. A middle-aged woman had lingered nearby, slowly stirring her coffee, listening in. The girl began crying. Between sobs, she asked, “But, why isn’t Grandma coming home with us?”
The old man turned to the woman and cheerfully said, “I think the ventriloquism lessons are really paying off.”
As the woman drifted away, the girl’s expression went blank. “Continue,” she said, wiping her face with the napkin.
“Sir, something is different this time. I mean, that just worked, but I think it’s a sign that they haven’t recovered properly from the last cycle.”
She grabbed the clear plastic coffee cup from his hands and popped the top off. “You have concerns.” She crunched ice cubes with exuberance.
“There is chatter on the sidewalks across from the playgrounds. Have the squirrels not been delivering my field reports?” His left leg began jogging in place. “I am beginning to feel exposed.”
The girl leaned back against the cold metal bar that constituted her seatback, and played dead for a few moments. She pretended to startle herself awake, and said, “We both are exposed, here and now, by your meeting request, Operative.”
The old man removed his purple tophat, smoothed out the peacock feather shoved into the brim, and turned the inside to face him. He said, “We just feel that this word has a worrisome definition. It says here: suggesting something supernatural; uncanny.” He put the hat back on and drummed on the top with both hands. “Avatar renewal was inevitable. We are just a little ahead of schedule.”
The girl pouted. “I should probably find my parents.”
“I’ll inform the rank and file to dial back the cognitive dissonance for a while.” The old man woke his tablet, and canceled this afternoon’s pole-dancing class. His students were going to be disappointed, but it was the right thing to do.
The girl jumped down and giggled like a normal child. “This is a relief, honestly.”
“Sir?”
“I thought you were going to say that they were made of meat.”
I was slightly inspired by the news of the past week or so. Why do you ask?