Spent a while this week thinking about a hotel terrace, a jumbo jet, and a very famous man watching it pass beneath eye-level.

Years ago, a man being interviewed on television stopped mid-sentence to watch a plane fly by, underneath where he was sitting, and grinned and called it, with no apparent irony at all, a grand journey. I stole the phrase. I gave it to somebody considerably less fortunate than a man on a terrace, and built a story around what happens when those exact words stop being true the moment you actually need them to be.

That’s Jamie. He’s not based on anyone. The phrase is the only thing in the story that’s real, and even that’s second-hand.

Read it on Kindle, alongside nineteen other stories

G. H. Schreiber

06/09/2026