My friends and I are in an on-again/off-again writing club where the rules are simple. Every two weeks you have to submit three short stories that it took you 20 minutes or less to write. These are the results.

She was the oldest flight attendant I’d ever seen on a plane. Her appearance was naturally grizzled from years of mile high partying, but she added another layer of disheveled glory by not doing her hair and makeup perfectly like her younger counterparts. Even the white shirt beneath her blue vest was partially untucked.

It certainly looked like she didn’t give a fuck, and her appearance proved to match with her attitude in the way she dealt with passengers before take off. Two rows ahead of me, a woman called her over to ask her why her overhead light didn’t work. Bluntly, she answered, “It’s broke.” The passenger somehow failed to pick up on the demeanor being forcefully thrown at her, and had the gall to ask if it would be fixed before the plane departed. At this, the stewardess leaned in and replied with a question of her own. “Are you joking?”

Her charge sufficiently shut up, she made the rounds of correcting people not with pleasantly pointed questions but with glares and gestures. Seats were put in their fully upright positions with a tap on the shoulder and a thumb pointing forward. Electronic devices were shut down with a pause and a look into the eyes of the power perpetrators. The only other thing I heard her utter before we left the runway was her tour of the exit row. Rather than the standard questionnaire, she just said, “You all know what you gotta do if we crash, right?”

My excitement mounted when it came time for the beverage service. What would I say to her? Would I be able to make her smile? Did I even want to?

Finally my turn came, and I politely asked for a Diet Coke. She just gave me the can. No cup. No ice. When she set the can down on my tray, I noticed she was wearing a bracelet made up of small pictures. But not just any pictures, they were all of people having sex: stills taken from pornographic films of an indeterminate era.

I jerked my head up and shot her a glance of mixed shock and awe. The corner of her mouth curled up and she said, “You’re the first person to notice it since I got it a month ago.”

Then she raised her eyebrows and slightly shrugged her shoulders in a ‘how about that’ moment, similar to what one might do after seeing something mildly interesting, like a dog jumping over a cat or something. She went about her business, and left me amazed. How I wished I had met her in her prime.