Baggage, Unattended

The pale young women wore dark clothes and black piercings. Patient and lethargic, they moved along the security line rolling absent stares like suitcases. They placed their bags in sterile tubs before fishing through sagging pockets, pulling out two asthma puffers and a collection of neon-coloured vapes, tossed like poker chips into the conveyor’s mix.

At the bar, the attractive couple sat opposite each other. Speaking softly and joking lightly in a volume only their ears could detect, they flicked between themselves knowing smiles and comfortable glances that revealed a shared judgement of the outside world.

Beside a vista of baked tarmac, a high table of colleagues perched. The women listen, watch, bored by the jovial men they sat unflinching throughout each short, gruff, baritone chuckle that cut evenly into breaths of three. Then, a woman spoke, and I watched from afar sets of glazed eyes sink into pitless disinterest like perfectly still pond water at dawn.