**WATTYS 2022 WINNER** Seventeen-year-old Evelyn Werth is on an endless flight from hell. She's the only person onboard Aloha Airways Flight 1333 who's caught in a 28-minute time loop.
During each cycle, four things happen:
1. The Internet goes out...
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Loop 392
The pilot finishes the same exact announcement for the 392nd time.
Only eight more times until I reach four hundred. I can't even process the thought. Four hundred loops.
I'm going mad. At some point during the last fifty loops, my sanity hit a snag and started unraveling so fast I can't stop it.
I never thought it would get to this. The baby wails behind me. I reach under my chair, mechanically grabbing the pacifier in my limp fingers. I always thought it would eventually change, somehow, in one way or another. I swing my heavy hand over the back of the seat and hold it there until the mother takes it.
But will there be a time when 400 loops seems like nothing? When this exact point will one day feel like it's just the very beginning of this awful nightmare?
The thought unnerves me. Makes my insides tremble.
Already, every second of every loop is like the worst version of déjà vu. Everything is known, has been played out. I'm sick of talking to almost everyone on this plane. The fact that I haven't already gone off-the-wall batshit is honestly a feat in itself.
Heather offers me a packet of pretzels, but I shake my head, and she hands it to Margaret instead.
"Can I get some coffee?" I ask, knowing the beverage service doesn't come for another ten minutes. I lick my cracked lips, and add, "The hotter the better."
Heather flashes me a plastic smile – a necessity for the job, she once told me – and jots it down on her pad. Then she's on to the next row.
Lately I've been feeling the desperation growing inside me, building in pressure from loop to loop, like a chamber of magma pooling beneath the surface. I know from past experience that there's no way to dissipate it. It just grows and grows until I do something stupid, which usually results in me ending up facedown against the ground, restrained by two large men – usually Bryan Cooke, a retired general who sits in 23C, and Mason Kahn, a mechanic in 28E. Last time Bryan dislocated my shoulder and although it only lasted for a few minutes, the memory of the buckling pain still makes my knees weak.
I reach for my Chapstick but change my mind, and let my lips stay dry. Everything's futile, anyways.
Margaret leans forward. "You alright, dear?" Worry spreads across her face, but I turn away, blocking her out.
The turbulence starts and the seat shakes underneath me. But it's nothing compared to the shaking happening inside me.
I'm at my breaking point. I have to do something. Have to try something. But I wrestle with exactly what I should do, and how much I should risk. While I clearly want out of this loop, I realized a long time ago that it's probably the only reason I'm still alive. The plane was nosediving. And while I'm certainly no aerodynamics expert, it's beyond obvious that nosedives are bad. Like really, really bad. Jason DeSouza in 48B, a chiropractor who sometimes flies small planes recreationally, told me that there reaches a point – VNE, or Velocity to Never Exceed – after which you can't just level out of a nosedive. It's in freefall, and there's no stopping it.
