text: Ever since I was little, I remember being fascinated by airplanes. Or, not just airplanes; all things that fly had me riveted practically since I breached the womb. I would always go with my brother down the local airfield and just watch airplanes take off and land. We would sit on the porch of the convenient store just off the grass, he would buy a moon pie for me and a pack of Chesterfields for him, and we would listen to the gentle, lazy whirring sound of planes going buy. I was 17 when he died--I’m sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me tell you about myself and my origins in a clearer manner. I’m from the small town of Collins, Wyoming. In 1940 (when I was 15, also the first time I checked) the population was 1,227; everyone in Collins new each other. There was an old man I used to walk past on my way home from school- Mr. McCullough-who remembered clearly the days blue smoke filled the skies as brothers killed each other. He would sit in his chair and smoke his pipe. Every now and again he would invite me into his house (mind you, he was a close friend of my family (and everyone in the town for that matter). I wouldn’t do this with just anyone) and pour me a cup of coffee. I hadn’t started drinking coffee yet, so this was my special moment. There was June Clark, who could be routinely found in her garden assuming whether permitted. She grew plants that I now know to be marijuana. There wasn’t really any serious policing in Collins; we took care of our own. Dwight Clark, her husband, owned the bookshop, which also served as a library. He was long since retired, and spent most of his days reading or playing cards. He taught me how to play Texas Holdem, and some days on the weekends, he would run an “underground game” that everyone knew about. They would drink gin and smoke cigars, winning and losing a full season’s worth of tanned deer skins. They never bet money. My father died when I was 12. He shot himself. My mother went four years later of liver complications from alcoholism. My brother, who was six years older than me, started looking after our little bit of land on the outsides of the town center, near the airport. He started getting into airplanes, and from there it turned into a passion for both of us. Jim Clark (same last name but no relation to Dwight and his wife) was the one who taught my brother to fly. They would go up in his old Curtis Jenny and practice flying. At the end of the day, I would enviously watch my brother push the Jenny into the dilapidated hangar at the Western corner of the field. It was a lovely scene, the sun setting behind the wire-winged airplane. My brother would always find me afterwards; he would light a cigarette and we would walk home together. Then 1941 came. I was becoming more independent, I was finally getting on with some of the other boys my age. I had a girlfriend, Trudy, whom I would take to the airport to watch my brother fly. She feigned interest, I now know. I loved having her around. I remember being happy for the first time since my father died. My brother told me one cold January morning that he had joined the Army Air Service. He was going to the Pacific. “Don’t worry, Tom.” he said. “I’ll be in the P-40, that’s the best airplane we have. I’ll be an ace before April.” I hugged him. I got the news on April 16th, 1942. He had been shot down near Port Moresby, presumed dead. I went to see Mr. McCullough. I figured he could help me. He asked me what happened, and I just started crying. I can’t remember anything else from that day, but he told me his good friend Jack Daniel had played a few cards in my favor. I woke up late in the night in my own bed room in my house, which I suppose I was the sole occupant of at that point. It was cloudy, no stars. The trees had that surreal shadow-less look to them. In memory the woods around my house give me chills, but I was calm. I remember walking down the stairs without lighting the oil lamp, something I never did. I’m chronically afraid of the dark. I walked straight through the trees, never questioning my footing. When I came to the Eastern side of the airfield, the stars and the moon appeared above me. I could see the convenient store where my brother and I sat, the hangar. I walked to the convenient store, Andy’s, it was called, and sat down on the steps. No tears came to me then, but I could feel the warm breeze of those summer nights over me again, hear the whir of the airplanes. I looked at the hangar. I realized I’d never been inside of it. I decided I needed to see that old Curtis Jenny right away. I got up and started walking. The man in the moon scowled upon me that night, I remember. The cold, gray scale face of the moon seemed terse that night. I found the door, and let myself in. Immediately in front of me was a biplane, but not the Jenny. It had a different shape, a larger engine. Guns. *Guns!* I thought. *This is a fighter plane!* But how had it gotten there? I walked towards it. I gently ran my hands along the propeller. “Watch it.” said a voice. I turned around quickly to the sight of a glowing ember in the corner of the hangar. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know this was yours.” I said. “I should have told you sooner, but I never was a good father.” My dad walked out into my view. The light in the hangar was moonlight, filtering in from the high South-facing windows. “Dad? But, you’re dead.” “Yeah, mortality has a tendency to get in the way of things.” “Dad!” I ran towards him. “Son, I don’t have much time, and neither does he.” “Who’s he?” “Me.” I turned around to see my brother, but he had a mustache and looked...exhausted. “Charlie, how--” “All will be explained, don’t worry.” he said. I looked behind him where the biplane had been, but it wasn’t a biplane. A riveted steel monoplane stood there instead, carrying the American insignia. It was a P-40; it was my brother’s plane. It clicked. The first airplane had belonged to my father. I turned and looked at him again; he was wearing World War One officer’s uniforms. The first fighter was what I now know to be a Spad. “I know what you’re thinking, and yes that’s my plane. I was a pilot, once. I flew in the Great War, with the hopes that no one would need to follow me in the years to come. It seems I’ve failed at that too.” “Why are you here? You’re both dead.” I said. “Well, we’ve been discussing that,” my brother said, lighting his cigarette. “and we wanted to give you a piece of wisdom.” “What’s that?” I asked. “Well, you’ve lost so much. But you mustn’t despair! We’re not completely gone.” My father said. “What do you mean?” My brother took up the response: “Was I once alive?” “Of course you...were.” I said to him. “What made him alive?” my father asked. “Was it my flesh? My bone? My blood? Of course not. It was my soul. And, quite frankly, those don’t vanish the same way as these mere corporeal globs. Everywhere we walk, everything we touch, takes a bit of our soul with it. But our souls are not like pies, being divided up and diminished, but as a candle flame, which may light all that is around in while never depleting. Take our airplanes, for example. Dad’s Spad rests in the hands of a collector in Britain, but does it belong to this collector? Surely not. Dad’s soul persists within that airplane. This is why you came here tonight.” “You see, Charlie, your brother, whom you loved very much, is gone forever. But, remnants of him may be found in our house, or the Curtis Jenny.” I looked behind him to see the Jenny where it had been left. “When relatives die, we seek heirloom: This is why. Those we’ve lost persist in the objects they leave behind. I am not dead because my body is gone, I am dead because I am forgotten by all.” My father stared into my eyes, he looked tired. “So, what about people who have no objects left? What about old Mrs. McCullough, who died in crossfire at Gettysburg? None of her belongings can be found anywhere.” “That’s the other type of afterlife,” my brother said. “We don’t die until all those whose hearts we have touched die as well. But here’s the catch: When someone who’s heart we have touched touches that of someone else’s, we are passed on too. You see, we are all saved by each other. If someone dies before they can touch someone else, in a metaphysical sense I mean, they are truly dead. And this is the tragedy of war.” “You see son, we are all connected by the same people.” I looked at the ground. “No one is born one way or another, we are all a mix and match of everyone we’ve ever met, and everyone they’ve ever met, and so on as far back as humans go. I’m sorry Tom, but we must leave.” I woke up with sunlight streaming into the hangar. I sat up. My head was throbbing. I looked around. The Jenny was parked nearby. I went to it, and I ran my hand along its propeller. *Every hangar is haunted, Tom.* My brother’s voice sounded in my thoughts. *How so, you ask?* *Planes travel; it’s what they do. Every time they stop, more and more unique people pour their souls into them. They are the culmination of humanity. Hangars are haunted to an unfounded degree, as they’ve been touched by all those airplanes, who were touched by all those people.* I don’t know where the moral is, or even why, seventy-seven years later, I’m writing this. Perhaps it’s that I’ve been trying to convince myself that this whole thing was a dream for my entire life, and just now have given up. I went to the United Kingdom recently, my daughter married a British man, and it was my grand-daughter’s birthday. We went to see some old airplanes, and one stuck out to me: A Spad. I took some photographs, did some research, and by the tail number it was my dad’s plane.