The Second Stop was Brazil

 The second stop was Brazil. The third was somewhere in Paraguay. The fourth was in a mission house in Quito, Equador. The fifth was in Caracas, under the stage of a pro-Chavez rally in a town square filled with 150,000 screaming peasants calling for a general strike. The gilded maple chest was under the stage. He put his scroll in the chest. They loaded it onto the plane. The sixth stop was a Portuguese-Spanish-Japanese language school in a Lima suburb.

 He couldn't speak Spanish so the 91-year-old Equadorean nun translated to Spanish from his Lebanese, the Brazillian volleyball coach translated into Portugese for the 16-year-old Peruvian student of scholarly Japanese to translate into the mic on the computer hooked up by webcam to what appeared to be a 10-year-old Japanese girl surrounded by scrolls in a pagoda. It was snowing heavily there.

 The pilot remarked to himself his desire to get back up Kilimanjaro again this summer. The cash from this trip meant he could take his blind aunt with him.

 He returned his scroll to the chest when the Japanese girl bowed and ended the webcam connection. They reboarded the plane and flew into the Andes. His watch beeped. They all moved to windows to look up into the clear night sky, watching the three satellites in their geosynch orbit that were part of the global LaserSatNet grow daffodil petals with their solar panels.

 He smiled.

 All smiled.

 He helped them all back into their seatbelts and checked to see which Andean glacier they were over.

 The first stop? It was Ararat.

 He firmly held the chest. He opened the door of the plane and left.

Stephen Buckley
Copyright 2003
10.23.03