Another plane

Another plane crashed into our house a couple days ago.  It tore right through the new siding.  We ran out to the dining room and found the pilot climbing out of the cockpit onto our shattered dining room table.  He apologized and asked to use the phone.

That wasn't even the worst one, the worst one was two before that one.  It clipped the chimney and the chimney sheared one of its wings off, and the cockpit tore through the second floor like a missile and wreckage made it all the way to the master bedroom.  This was in the morning, we were just getting ready for work, but the pilot wouldn't leave because he had to catalogue the damage for his insurance claim.  He was taking pictures of everything, including, it seemed, my wife's lingerie drawer.  When we asked him to leave he started yelling at me and going on about the insurance.  I had to stay at the house until he left and my boss chewed me out for being late, this was after I'd only been working there for a couple weeks and he made me spend the day cleaning toilets even though I'm supposed to be a licensed customer service representative and we only have two toilets in the office, when I'd be done cleaning one he'd go and pour spaghetti sauce into it so I'd have something to clean after I was done cleaning the other.

We live across the street from an airport, is the problem.  Not a real airport, just a small landing strip in our little town.  People land their little two-seater planes here and they have flying lessons.  My wife was worried about the planes when we bought the place, but the realtor pointed out the traffic was so heavy on the street in front of our house that any plane that skidded off the runway would just get hit by a car before it got to our yard.  But mostly they cruise in and crash without even hitting the ground.

We spend most of our time in the back of the house now.  The front of the house we just use as storage, for things that we wouldn't mind too awfully much a plane crashing into.

A hang glider flew off a hill near our house on the other side.  He was aiming for the airport, apparently, but he drifted into our chimney.  We were away for the weekend and he got stuck halfway down and was crushed or suffocated or something or both.  By the time we got home we just saw his stiff bent legs sticking out; the hang glider had crashed through our daughter's window.  The police or whoever it was we called had to saw our chimney off to collect the hang glider's remains so they could be returned to his family.

After the hang glider we went to town hall to complain about the constant air crashes into our home.  We got a meeting with the zoning guy.  He said planes crashing into our house had never been a problem before we'd bought the place, and suggested we must have done something to create the problem, or else we were just complainer, who he said were not generally welcome in his town.  He told us that maybe we should paint our house neon colors so that planes could see it better from the air and could prepare not to crash into it so often.  It was true that our house was a rather drab beige but neither I nor my wife were sure we wanted to live in a house painted neon colors.  While we were in the meeting a student pilot landed on the lawn and half his plane basically bounced off the turf into our home office.  The walls are now charred and stink of fuel.  An engine landed on our other car and it caught on fire so now the kids have to take the bus to school.

One time we got crashed into at about three in the morning.  I didn't even wake up.

We were worried about the effect that planes crashing frequently into our house might be having on our kids, so we sat our daughter (Molly) down and asked her what she thought of all of this and she said she likes to think that each plane is an angel, and when they crash into us it's a sign of God's favor.  We explained to her why that was pretty stupid, explained how plane crashes were not blessings, that there was much mayhem and damaged metal involved, that we were getting hammered on repair costs and the property was worth basically nothing at this point, and then we heard the telltale low buzzing of a plane getting closer and the metallic wumphf of a plane burrowing itself into our home.  You see! Molly cried, You see!  It's a message from Him!  You doubted Him and He sent His messenger!  She grabbed a Bible off her desk (I don't know where she got the Bible) and ran out into the foyer and the two of us followed her.  The room was filling up with cottony puffs of gray smoke.  "What message do you bring from God?" Molly asked.  The pilot didn't hear her as he hoisted himself out of his seat.  "Motherfucker," he said.  Molly's face clouded and she whipped the Bible at him and it caught him in the shoulder.  "Watch the attitude!" the pilot yelled, and Molly stomped back to her room.

The pilot picked up the Bible.  "Hey, I've heard about this," he said.  He flipped open to a page somewhere in the middle.  "'It is better to take refuge in the LORD than to put confidence in man,'" he read.  "'It is better to take refuge in the LORD than to put confidence in princes.'  Hey, this is all right!"  His wings unfurled themselves from his back and he flapped out the hole he'd left in the front of our house, then he clipped a power line and fell onto the road.