Chapter 3 - A Flying Start (5)

It might have ended here and this story might have come to a rather sad and abrupt end. But it didn’t. Storky’s Quality flyer managed to get itself upright and started flapping its wings frantically. It seemed to work. They were still falling but at least they weren’t plummeting anymore. The flyer even managed to send out a distress signal.

“Mayday! Mayday!” shouted the stork. “We’ve lost all left-wing feathers! Tail-feathers are disintegrating! There’s something in my eye! Oh no! There’s something in my eye! I can’t breathe! Help! Help! Nurse! Oxygen mask! Oxygen mask! We’re a goner-zero! I repeat, we’re a goner-zero! We’ll have to make an emergency landing!”

“Emergency landing?” shouted-asked Sinister, his eyes tightly shut.

“Crash landing, you idiot! We’re about to crash!”

“Oh no! Crash! We’re about to crash! Somebody help! The ground hasn’t done anything. We don’t need to hit it! Where are the crash barriers?!”

By now the wind was screaming past and the stork had ceased to flap his wings. They were yet again simply tearing at the ground.

Suddenly they were not tearing at the ground anymore. They’d hit it. Luckily for Dexter and Sinister the stork had hit the ground beak first, tail in the air. They were all right, apart from several traumatic images that were burned into their brains forever. So the tail-end really is the safest place to be during a crash, thought Dexter, reminded of the survivor stories he’d read in ‘101 Ways to Miss the Ground and Keep the Longing at Bay’.

Stork Seven-Three-Seven, however, had left the here-and-now and was at this moment happily flapping away in a world where flying into a rage was simply a saying.

Dexter and Sinister looked at one another speechlessly, then at the woods surrounding them on all sides and then both collapsed into an exhausted sleep.