At parties, he’d tell strangers he was a problem solving janitor, piquing interest to proceed with tales of clearing debris from crash sites, labeling and cataloging pieces of aircraft jig saw to reveal the reason for lives abruptly left behind.

There was the official record, he’d tell them; black boxes that were sole survivors, names, dates of birth, nationalities, scattered corpses confirmed by dental records. For the still interested, and by that point having finished the wine he’d been nursing on first introductions, he’d confide that what he most loved about his job was the unofficial records, stories pieced together after surreptitiously removing film from cameras in varying degrees of integrity, watching traces of lives lost in flight reform in subterranean chemical baths; his new acquaintances usually excused themselves to mingle or get another drink before he had a chance to pull out his little album of best ofs.

 

Inspired by Sonya’s Three Line Tales Week Forty-Five