Memoir & Fiction

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Anything with Two Legs and a Pulse


At 24, I impulsively threw away a respectable but boring life in suburban California for a stint as a London based flight attendant. A whirlwind of parties, clubs and pubs had me yearning for something real, and a down-to-earth connection proved ever harder to find in my fashionable fast lane crowd.

The Talk


I’m only 5’2”, yet I tower over her. My wrists are the size of her biceps. As I take my shoes off at her doorstep, she offers me a pair of her slippers, but I can’t even fit my toes into the opening. I laugh, nervously, loudly. I’m loud, and I’m large, and I’m bumbling. I’m the uncivilized white girl her first-born Korean son has brought home for the holidays. She says nothing, and keeps her eyes focused on the floor demurely, submissively, but despite her constant deferrals to her husband and sons, I know she’s the heavy. Hers is the only opinion that matters.
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The Pretenders


A surrogate gift and a feigned smile prove it really is the thought that counts.

Walking on Air


“I don’t want to tell you how you die. I don’t ever do that. BUT” says the fortune teller as she grabs my hand and looks into my eyes. “Quit your job. It’s bad. Very bad.” I’m a flight attendant. Sometimes on a trans-Atlantic night flight, when all the passengers are sleeping and the crew is in the galley sipping coffee to stay awake, I tell them what she said. They may not like me, but they are alert. Besides, popularity doesn’t concern me. I’m only a reserve, which means I’m on call to fill in for absentees, and at an airline with 26,000 flight attendants, I rarely meet the same people twice.

Early Departure


I wind the plastic tubing of the oxygen mask around my hand then let it drop from above 5B. I tug it to demonstrate initiating the flow of oxygen then pull the mask over my nose and mouth, adjusting the straps as necessary. On another day, perhaps I would have held the little yellow mask out in front of my face to avoid germs as so many of us do. But this morning, they’re all watching me, unfolding safety cards instead of newspapers. No rustling, no conversations, just hundreds of eyes staring straight at us.