Sunday
Bonanza Gloop, a Tier II Mud Monitor in Park Ridge, looks skyward at exactly 9:23 AM and notices that an Airbus A320, CloudAir flight 447 inbound to O’Hare, has stopped in its final approach and is hovering in midair directly above her mud field. Shocked and annoyed, Bonanza immediately notifies her supervisor.
By 11:30, a small crowd has gathered to witness the strange phenomenon. Bonanza’s supervisors at Mud Central are busy researching procedure in the Mud Manual and have not instructed her how to respond.
“Hey,” says boiled food expert Brandolin Surplus, one of the dozens of gawking civilians, “Do you think the airport knows about this?”
The airport does know about this, and after repeated and belligerent requests for comment from local media, O’Hare spokesperson Kevin Kevin Kevin calls a press conference and delivers the following statement, presented here in its entirety:
Thank you for your concern.
He then leaves his podium, hurries to a waiting safe room, and locks himself inside as frenzied reporters attempt to ask him follow-up questions.
Monday
Bonanza Gloop returns to work to see the plane still hanging in exactly the same spot, and that the morning mud has been ruined by a gathering of onlookers, whose presence has made the mud nervous and soupy. Bonanza is annoyed, but remembers her training and keeps her emotions in check.
“I wonder what’s going on in there,” whispers Monica Surplus, Brandolin’s sister.
On board CloudAir flight 447, calm and order reign supreme. Passengers sit patiently as flight attendants embark on their fifteenth beverage service. In business class, marijuana dispensary franchising agent Sputnik Hawaii glances placidly at his zinc-plated designer watch, and the voice of the pilot rings out over the speakers:
Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We continue to hover 920 feet over Chicago, and at this time our landing has been postponed indefinitely. When the situation changes, you’ll be the first to know. Thanks for your patience!
“You’re welcome!” rejoin the passengers in sing-song unison.
“Gosh, it must be horrible. I can’t even imagine,” continues Monica as her feet squelch in the mud.
Bonanza grits her teeth.
“Boo hoo,” adds Monica. Squelch, squelch squelch. “Boo hoo hoo.”
Tuesday
Bonanza is horrified to discover that by the following morning, a candlelight vigil has broken out in the middle of her mud field. Scores of enthralled vigileers, heads canted back at uncomfortable angles, jostle each other for a glimpse of the hovering aircraft. Their feet have utterly intimidated the mud, and all of Bonanza’s encouraging progress has been lost. She can feel the fury boiling just beneath her scalp—oh, how she would love to fry these feckless boors —fry their feet especially so they could never terrify the poor, innocent mud ever again! But she admonishes herself to remember her training, to remember in particular the words of her mentor, a grizzled old guru named Plaxton Blonus:
M’dear, the life of a Mud Monitor is full of sorrows. It is our station. We are chosen for this task because we are strong enough to endure in wretched silence.
And so, endure Bonanza does.
Airport officials still cannot be reached for further comment, despite reporters’ efforts to scale the control tower and burn it to the ground.
The plane continues to hover, the lights on its wingtips blinking gaily as if noting is amiss.
“I can’t take it anymore!” shrieks vigileer DiAnnister Shanklin, a minor-league shapes analyst from Mesa, Arizona, on loan to Goose Island Brewing for the purpose of creating a limited run of octagonal bottle caps. She stomps her muddy feet in impotent frustration, and Bonanza’s blood growls in her head.
Wednesday
Nothing happens on Wednesday.
Thursday
Thursday, November 10th is important because four things happen:
That morning, the Blobcake Hut at Touhy and Greenwood offers a two-for-one deal on mashed tomato Blobcakes, and three people are killed in the ensuing frenzy.
The King of O’Hare arrives at work for the first time in remembered history, calls all of the Airport Regents into a dark and gloomy room, and makes an unspecified number of secretive plans.
That afternoon, Bonanza returns from her lunch break and is incensed to see that one of the vigileers has removed his shoes and is using his bare and hideous toes to forcibly agitate the mud. Bonanza can feel the mud crying out in anguish and fear, and she is no longer able to contain the savage fury that rips scaldingly out the top of hear head, laying waste to every vigileer in sight.
In this rage-induced fugue state, Bonanza fully understands that her violent reaction is morally wrong and indeed unprofessional, but she is unable to stop herself, almost as if she is watching an amusing internet video depicting these vicious acts.
When Bonanza regains her composure, she is surrounded by tattered bodies, all floating face-down in the panicked mud.
At 11 PM, Drexel Convexel, assistant answering machine operator at Ladders Excelsior, the foremost ladder manufacturing concern in all of Oak Park, logs a request for the most ambitious order his company has ever undertaken. After filling out the order form, he rings the bell three times just as his father taught him so many years ago, and swallows a handful of anti-anxiety pills kept in a nearby glass ampoule for precisely this eventuality.
Friday
Bonanza sits in a dank cell in the sub-basement of Mud Central’s office of Municipal Mud Administration. She takes a deep breath as yesterday’s memories come seeping back to her: so much ferocity. The mud must have been terrified.
Alone for the first time, Bonanza finally allows herself to weep. Her offense is severe: she has let her anger prevail, and in so doing she has besmirched the name and noble calling of Mud Monitors everywhere. Mud Central’s retribution will surely be severe. She hears footsteps in the corridor and braces herself for the worst.
It would be an understatement to say that Bonanza is surprised by the person who enters her cell: Tedd Sprudd, the king of O’Hare! With four Airport Regents in tow!
King Sprudd explains to Bonanza—by way of an interpreter—that her feat of barbaric strength has come to the Airport’s attention, and that he has a task for her by which she might atone for her shameful outburst.
Bonanza graciously and grovelingly accepts the King’s proposal, whereupon she is whisked away to a secret facility near Concourse D.
Saturday
At 7:07 AM, the ladder is raised in the Trader Joe’s parking lot across the street from Bonanza’s mud field, coming to rest against the body of the stranded plane with a barely-audible clank. The event is attended by historical certificate cosigner I. Zimbabwe Escape, Jr., who verifies it to be the tallest ladder ever used within the Chicago metropolitan area.
Pausing only for a kiss of encouragement from Municipal Kissing Practitioner Vent Spiffeners, Bonanza begins her 920-foot climb to the stranded jet.
On board CloudAir flight 447, the stranded passengers are entering the seventh day of their flight. Spirits remain high as the cabin crew cues up the latest Kevin James movie for its 58th consecutive showing, and the plane is filled with jovial laughter.
Bonanza gasps for breath as she reaches the apex of her climb, where she is careful not to stand on the topmost rung of the ladder for safety reasons. She finds that she can lean up against the fuselage of the jet as she rests, gazing down at the city far below. She’s never really grasped how big it is until this moment, and she is alarmed to note how little of it is made of mud.
It’s almost as if her job isn’t important, she muses before she stops herself and clears her mind by internally reciting the Mud Monitors’ Oath:
To this I swear, my word be true
I watch the mud and gain its trust
This watch I hold the whole year through:
I hold this watch because I must.
Bonanza knows what she must do. She rises to her feet, presses her shoulder against the cold metal of the plane, and gives it a single emphatic shove.
As the plane drifts away—slowly at first, but rapidly gaining speed—Bonanza watches the scores of happy passengers waving to her through their windows, mouthing the words, “THANK YOU!” as they sail off to their final destination.
Well, that’s that, Bonanza thinks to herself—and at that precise instant realizes that the plane is gone, and there is now nothing for the ladder to lean against.
Given an altitude of 920 feet (h) and a mass of 130 pounds (m), with an air resistance of 0.16 pounds/foot (k) and the gravitational constant of 32.19 feet/second2 (g), we can determine the duration of Bonanza’s free fall using the following formula:
Therefore: Bonanza spends approximately nine seconds in free fall, during which time she contemplates her Earthly existence.
Second 1
Bonanza reflects on her hatred of ladders.
Second 2
Bonanza recalls an idiomatic expression her mother used to use when she was overcome by emotion:
Loooooord piss a pickle!
Second 3
Bonanza witnesses a minor car accident at Busse and Morris. One of the cars is red and one is brown.
Second 4
The color brown reminds Bonanza of her one true passion: the mud. She thinks about how warm and gooshy it is, how full of hope and possibility.
Second 5
Bonanza revisits the memory of her violent outburst. She considers just how damaging it must have been for the poor, saintly mud to see the guardian it had grown to rely on becoming so enraged and deadly, how the mud is now surely traumatized for good. How she would never have been able to fully regain its respect, even had she succeeded today.
Second 6
How perhaps it is for the best that she should perish.
Second 7
Bonanza thinks back on all the good times she had with the Park Ridge mud—love and happiness and growing together.
How she’s sorry for the hurt she’s caused the mud, and how in time, under the watchful eye of a new, more competent Mud Monitor, she hopes it can overcome this setback and flourish once more.
Second 8
Bonanza hears the Song of the Mud for the first time since she graduated from her training and was adorned with her mud hat before a thousand cheering well-wishers. It is wistful and beautiful.
Second 9
Now, Bonanza knows, she will die. But she believes in her gloopy heart that she will someday be reborn out of the muck, for from mud she came and to mud she shall return, over and over forever. Bonanza Gloop. Gloop: mud. She is mud, in her mud-heart.
The mud field is close now. It is fitting that she should fall here. It is right.
At this moment, Bonanza is traveling at 153 feet per second, or just over 100 miles per hour. She will strike the ground with a force of over 40 g’s, killing her instantly.
Or she would, were it not for the mud, which at this instant leaps up and envelops Bonanza, cradling her for the final thirty feet of her descent and depositing her gently on the ground with what most onlookers hear as a whoosh, but sounds to Vent Spiffeners exactly like “I love you.”
CloudAir flight 447 lands safely at O’Hare. Everyone hugs each other and then goes home.
Sunday
By Sunday, everything has returned to normal. Bonanza Gloop arrives at the mud field that morning to find no jet overhead, no disruptive candlelight vigil, just beautiful, beautiful mud.
The sun is bright. The mud twinkles. Everything is going to be fine.