Life One Letter at a Time

a is for airplane

© James Pyles

Timmy’s airplane was an hour late arriving in Omaha which just added to Glenn’s sense of missing his boy. Fortunately, the stewardess made sure he got off first. When he saw him, little Timmy let go of her hand and ran to his Dad.

“Dad! Dad!” He flew into Glenn’s arms.

“You sure have grown, Timmy.” They hugged and he lifted the child off the floor. “How old are you now, 22, 23?”

“Don’t be silly, Daddy. I’m only nine.”

The man put his son back down and shook hands with the attractive, brunette stewardess who had been in charge of his son during the long flight from Los Angeles.

“Thank you so much for taking care of him on the plane, Miss…” he looked at her name tag, “…Stewart.”

“It was my pleasure, Mr. Evans. He’s a really sweet boy.”

“Ah, Janice.” Timmy rolled his eyes at being called “sweet.”

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Last Flight


Abandoned church near the cemetery in the Buckhorn, Iowa ghost town.

“Gotta set down, boys. Oil pressure’s dropping fast.”

“What about that road? Charlie, can you make it?”

“Lining it up, Jim. You and Ted like jumping outta planes so hold your water while I land this tub.”

Pilot Charlie Kern liked teasing the two veteran skydivers, but they’d proved their courage hundreds of times. The Cessna 172 approached the dirt road lightly covered with snow opposite an abandoned church.

Paul Lambert stood in the old Buckhorn cemetery looking at their graves. They crashed fifty years ago a few hundred yards away. As their closest friend, his Dad Chuck had them buried here. Paul paid his respects and listened as the ghosts of Charlie, Ted McKeever, and Jim Buckley re-enacted their final moments on the anniversary of their last flight. Somewhere above, he could hear the laboring engine of a Cessna fighting to stay in the air just a few seconds longer.

I wrote this for the What Pegman Saw flash fiction challenge. The idea is to take a Google maps image and location and use it as the inspiration to craft a piece of flash fiction no more than 150 words long. After much editing, my word count is 150.

Today, the Pegman takes us to the ghost town of Buckhorn, Iowa. I looked up Buckhorn on the web, and according to The Vintage News:

Buckhorn is a ghost town, located in Jackson County just off of Highway 64. Some quick research reveals that it was a farmers’ cooperative founded early in the 20th century, and then was bought out by a large dairy in 1962. All that is left of it is a cemetery, an abandoned church, and this building, the old Buckhorn Creamery.

Okay, not much to go on.

I looked up Buckhorn on Google maps and it’s not particularly isolated. In fact, it’s only about a third of a mile from the Maquoketa Municipal Airport. I thought about doing a historical piece, but even consulting several sources, I couldn’t find out when the airport was established. However, looking at the airport’s official website gave me an idea, but I’d have to monkey around with history to pull it off.

When I was a kid, I watched a TV show called Ripcord starring Larry Pennell, Ken Curtis, and Shug Fisher. The show ran from 1961 to 1963 and depicted the adventures of two expert skydivers (Pernell as Ted McKeever and Curtis as Jim Buckley) who did everything from perform dangerous aerial stunts to capturing bank robbers, always with the climax being jumping out of an airplane and going into free fall.

Skydiving was new back then and the sport had just become incredibly popular, which is probably what kept the show going for its two-year run.

Actor Paul Comi played the original pilot Chuck Lambert but he was replaced in the middle of the first season by Shug Fisher as Charlie Kern. I got all these details from Wikipedia and decided to run with it, making their last flight in 1963 or ’64. Not sure if Buckhorn was a ghost town by then since it had only been bought out in 1962, but here’s where I fudge history.

In my imagination, Kern was trying to make Maquoketa Municipal Airport, but again, I have no idea if the airport even existed back then.

I created the character Paul Lambert, Chuck Lambert’s son, who would be in his early to mid 60s in 2017 combining actor Paul Comi’s name with his character’s in order to complete my ghost story.

I know. My explanation is longer than the story itself, but it was fun tying all this stuff together.

To read other stories based on the prompt, go to

The Hidden

the invaders

From the first episode of “The Invaders” (1967) with Roy Thinnes as David Vincent and Diane Baker as Kathy Adams.

No one believed him. He wasn’t surprised, but he was frustrated. He wasn’t some nut or UFO conspiracy kook. He was a rational human being who had been thrown into an irrational if not insane world.

Architect David Vincent. 29 years old, considered reasonably good-looking, divorced for two years, no kids, a successful career but at the cost of friendships, marriage, and family.

It wasn’t his fault that he’d seen an alien spaceship land near a deserted diner off of an old State road used by almost no one anymore. It wasn’t his fault that the only two witnesses, a newlywed couple who had been camping nearby, hadn’t seen or heard anything, not even the approach and then rapid departure of David’s car. It wasn’t his fault that the local Sheriff thought he was another crazy Californian trying to play a prank on what he thought was some dumb country Arizona officer.

There had to be evidence at the site. David had to tell someone. He drove to the nearest town, burst into the Sheriff’s office, and demanded an investigation.

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