On Lost Luggage (Patreon)

It's a familiar cliche: a man flies somewhere and discovers his luggage is lost in transit.  For whatever reason--an urgent business meeting, perhaps; or he picked up the wrong suitcase--he's "forced" to wear women's clothing as he doesn't have any of his own.  Hijinks ensue.

Well, the airport lost my luggage.  Or rather, they simply didn't bother putting it on the plane.  An hour of watching the carousel deliver its suitcases, and all the other passengers come, wait, and leave with their goods; until I gave up, tracked down a rep (nearly another hour) and was told to just fill in an online form.

Worse, there was an... incident, on the plane, that left me with a fine spattering of vomit on my jeans and shirt.  Fun times.

So what happened, despite the clear setup?  Reality.  When I got to my destination with only the clothes on my back (and the entertainment in my carry-on), the dirty clothes went in the wash.  The wash did not inexplicably destroy my clothes.  I borrowed something for the night that was shockingly not cross-gendered, and my lost suitcase is due to be reunited with me today.  

Fortunately, fiction isn't reality (though the best of it mirrors it it) and it seemed too good an inspiration to waste.  So, riding a particularly fine wave of jetlag, I'm going to try and write a short one-off based on this all-too common trope, the lost luggage one, with the singular intention of keeping it short.

I'm aiming for around 1500-2000 words; 5000 as an absolute maximum.  I've got a rough idea of how I want to structure it: essentially, stealing the narrative frame from Haruki Murakami's woderful short story "On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful Morning."  It'll probably be G-rated, maybe an R.  Hopefully I'll have that to share with you by the end of the week.

Meanwhile, jetlag is as good a reason as any to start the day's writing at 5am, so off I go....