A Mistake That Costs Someone’s Life (FICTOID)
They pulled the pilot’s body from the wreck in the Everglades. Well, most of his body.
His plane hit at a steep angle and high rate of speed. Parts of him may have gone flying off at the moment of impact, or maybe they were devoured by wild life.
Who knows? Who cares?
The FAA crash investigation crew released a bulletin that squarely placed the blame on the engineer who reset the aileron links without enough grease, despite a posted notice to do so.
As a result the controls froze up midflight, the plane nosed over, and before the pilot could call mayday it slammed into the swamp at 185mph.
“Don’t you feel the least bit guilty about it?” the engineer’s girlfriend asked. She’d invited him over because she thought he needed comforting, but now, as he flossed his teeth after devouring the meal she fixed him, he seemed more like a fiend than a friend.
“Nope,” he said with good humor, examining his nose in the mirror for zits.
“But a man died because of you.”
“We all die, bae. Each and every one of us.”
“But he didn’t have to die now,” she said.
“Oh? And how would you know? Maybe he was fated to die exactly that way. In that case, I’m simply an agent of fate, and not to blame at all.”
His girlfriend picked up a steak knife. If he approached her now, she’d call it fate.
© Buzz Dixon
