On this day in 1949, the BSSA passenger plane Star Ariel departed Bermuda bound for Kingston, Jamaica, and vanished into the Bermuda Triangle. Almost exactly a year earlier, the Star Tiger did the same thing.
There are plausible explanations for the loss of the Star Tiger. Besides bad weather, there might have been a fire from a faulty heater. Chillingly, communication with the pilots also hinted at a terrible mistake-in-the-making. Because of the strong headwinds, the Star Tiger was flying very low, at 2,000 feet. But in their radio communications, the pilots always reported themselves at the more common flight level of 20,000 feet. Not only does an altitude of only 2,000 feet give you very little room to respond when something goes wrong with the plane, but it’s possible the pilots actually forgot they were flying so low, and simply flew into the ocean while descending. (This is called controlled flight into terrain and thinking you are at a higher altitude than you are is a major cause of it.)
The Star Ariel, however, was a normal flight. The weather was fine. The flight altitude was 18,000 feet. The only problems were transitory radio issues. And yet the plane vanished. Neither flight sent a distress call (that was received, anyway) and no wreckage was ever found.
Obviously, there are logical reasons that planes go missing over the ocean, and Tudors in particular. (There were 38 Tudor planes manufactured, and seven of them crashed.)
But we're not looking for logic! We’re here for Bermuda Triangle writing prompts. And here's one right now:
The undiscovered country. Maybe the planes actually just crashed. But maybe it’s not the crashes themselves that make the Bermuda Triangle so freaky (because in reality, planes and ships don’t go missing in the Triangle any more than they do anywhere else)— maybe the reason that the Triangle unsettles people so much is that something weird happens there after you crash. Perhaps you end up in limbo, or a time loop, or in a city beneath the waves. You could get reincarnated as someone always doomed to die in a mishap at sea. Maybe you become a sea monster that wants to eat planes.
Read the rest of the article and prompts
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The Girl in the Back of the Class
She was more shadow than flesh. An outline of a person rather than an actual human being. Just one of those students who is there to take up the empty spaces in a classroom.
The only time anyone noticed her was when a member of the football team decided to torment them; smashing her into a locker, stealing their lunch off of cafeteria trays, administering burns to her sensitive wrists.
She didn’t show up to class in the fall. Her desk, with its creaking planks and runes etched onto its burnt edges, lay lonely in the Autumn-wine shade.
Her mom is wiry and ancient, living off benefit check after benefit check. She spends the day handing out missing posters to strangers instead of seeking employment.
The other parents in the neighborhood tut and fuss at this strange limbo of a woman. Now that her daughter is gone she should just fade away from public life; become a mournful silhouette against colorful wallpaper.
The girl was strange, alternative, lonely. No one cares to remember her in any significant way. Except maybe with embarrassment. Next year, she will be dug up with the rotting snow.
Still, no-one new moves into town. Her desk remains empty. Unloved. It takes the rest of the class two months to pry open her old locker. Their heads ache when the idea comes to mind.
The locker is covered in old stickers and permanent marker soliloquies. The lock has to be twisted inside out three times over before the door gives way. Its hinges seem to ooze an unnatural blue ooze. Territorial marks made by a girl who was never noticed.
She went to a lot of shows, they realize, shuffling through tickets from a year ago. Corrupted snapshots and polaroids display flashing stage-lights and mosh-pits.
One photo, tacked onto the locker door with wrinkled strips of tape, shows a figure with teased hair and ringed eyes. The girl had never smiled before. Death made her grin.
A war-torn notebook is buried inside too, along with several home-made zines in a misshapen drawer. Its cover is decorated with baby lambs and human skulls. They interact within speech bubbles, scribbled hastily on the page. They ask each other what the color of the sky is.
The zines belong to a collection, written almost obsessively over the girl’s high school years. Beneath the Wire. Her classmates go through them together as a makeshift research group, anticipating some kind of extensive eulogy. They instead discover something else entirely.
No one ever expected the dead girl to be funny but humor drips quietly across every page. Drawings depict herself as a gorgon, hair twisting and floating above her as its own entity, who turns various people from town into stone. Poems which don’t really rhyme retell times that she skipped school to people-watch. Multiple caricatures of people riding the bus are pasted into the notebook’s margins.
There’s a woman with a pink beehive that reaches the clouds, smoking ten cigarettes at once.
A couple with matching scowls, combat boots and spiked hair, who shoot lasers through the cracked bus windows.
An old man in a defunct army uniform, whose soul spews from his ass and rants about the “good ol’ days of ‘nam”.
The last page expresses the same attitude. There’s no sadness, no pain. Just a scribble of the chemistry teacher sodomising himself with a rolled up poster depicting the periodic table.
The class gather up all the vanished girl’s belongings and hand them over to her mother the next morning, putting an end to her spell over town. At least, to them anyway.
The mother takes everything home and arranges her daughter’s life on the kitchen table. It is a holy experience, like she’s identifying a skeleton. She gazes at the comics, the lyrics, the grinning photographs…they all seem to sink deep underneath her flesh. Finally, she lets out a small cry.
By the next week, she has stopped handing out missing posters. Now, she gives out copies of Beneath the Wire in the local park, a wistful expression on her face as winter approaches.
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