​The Inscrutable Adventures of Manuas T. Piranha

​The man continued to chop the frozen ice field into several blocks, throwing them all in a pile near Manny. When he finished he gathered all the blocks and put them into a large gunny sack that had been folded and tucked into the side of his pants. He twisted the top close, heaved it over his right shoulder, and headed inland about a quarter mile to a silvery bush plane. 

 

The old scrap looked unflyable. A collection of dents - big and small, deep and shallow - adorned its fuselage. It must have knocked every type of bird out of the sky - a likely assumption considering its wings, which were fixed from above, were hardly fixed from above. They flopped around like wet pancakes. And that was just when it was warming up on the runway. What a disaster it would be in flight. Poor fowl. 

 

A rusty, nicked up chunk of metal that had long ago dulled on the edges somehow stayed attached to the nose of the plane. Though roughly worn, the propeller had just enough life to drag the old beast into the air where, due to a grotesquely bent tail wing, it flew in a semi-sideways, diagonal manner, much like the slidey way dogs often trot.    

 

Its sad, exhausted tires offered no assistance. Try as they may, they couldn’t keep themselves more than halfway inflated, making takeoffs and landings dangerously bouncy affairs. 

 

The sickliest part of the whole contraption was its doddering engine. It popped and smoked every time its pilot readied it to fly, thus the reason for the pile of small red extinguishers laying next to the captain’s chair. It was healthy enough to cough the relic up into the air, yet too sick to consistently keep it there. The pilot would have had better luck were it a horseshoe.  

 

The plane required no fancy paint job or detailing as it was already spiffied up in its own holes, rust, and burn marks. Scuffs and scratches on the windows accentuated its charm, along with greatly increasing the danger to fly it.  

 

If launched into the air there would be no reasonable expectation for it to survive a light drizzle. It was more a conversation piece that should be sitting in a museum where paying customers who stand behind a thigh-high yellow rope can reimagine its glory days of rugged adventure when it flew through ungodly storms past gnarly, snow-capped mountains, fighting every gust of wind that tried to bully it into the peaks. It could well have crashed a time or 20. Nevertheless, it flew.