?Interrobang! · Track 87 · middle
The Things That Have Flown Their Last
OBJECT (intimate, what Sisukiro found): old yearbooks full of inscriptions and inside jokes. OWNER (re-linked by Sisukiro): New Plane Nancy — airplane-boneyard manager from the Arizona desert; note the irony of the name. FOUND AT: the old military atoll of Johnston. THE (UN)LIKELY STORY & THE UNANSWERABLE QUESTION: Nancy manages a graveyard of retired planes though she's New Plane; left her old yearbooks among ghosts on a military atoll. What do we do with the things that have flown their last?
Lyrics
Johnston Atoll. Eighty-two degrees at dusk. The runway is nine thousand feet of coral and ghosts. And here, in a rusted footlocker… Her yearbooks. They call her New Plane Nancy. Back in the Arizona dust, at Davis-Monthan. She walks the rows of giants, wings clipped. Engines silent, canopies filmed with sand. She catalogs the endings. Every day, she signs the papers for what will never fly again. But she carried these across an ocean. What do you do with the things that have flown their last? A B-52 with its spine broken on the tarmac. A friendship sealed in a yearbook from a life you don't have. Signed in ink, promised forever. What do you do with the things that have flown their last? The pages are brittle. They snap in the salt air, a sound like fire. Smell of mildew and old glue, jet fuel and bird lime. I open one. The Spartans, Class of '89. "Nancy, you're the best! Never change!" "H.A.G.S.!" - Have a great summer. "Remember Mr. Jensen's class? LOL." Every page, a promise that didn't know it was temporary. This whole island is a boneyard. A Burger King opened here in 1986. Gone in a year. They tested the bombs of Operation Dominic just offshore in 1962. A flash in the sky, and then… this silence. This long, slow return to sand and rust. She must have known. She brought her ghosts to meet the others. What do you do with the things that have flown their last? A bomber that saw the flash over the Pacific. A girl in a photograph, smiling a future she never got. Signed in hope, promised forever. What do you do with the things that have flown their last? A signature fades under my thumb. The sun bleeds out on the horizon. The ink and the salt and the silence. Just the question.