SUNDAY REVIEW / SHORT STORY: MILLION WAYS TO DIE

SHORT FICTION.

By Thomas Shess.

Morning didn’t arrive. 

It intruded. 

 It came in sideways, with the sound first. A sound that didn’t belong to weather or traffic or anything living. A tearing noise, metallic and wrong, as if the day itself had split a seam and couldn’t be stitched back together. 

 The sky was already awake when people noticed—awake and burning in a way skies aren’t supposed to burn. There is only one way to be born. There are a million ways to die. That morning chose one. 

*** 

The Madrid runway--perhaps it was Orly in Paris or Rio--it didn't matter because it was supposed to be clean. And supposed was the word they used later. So, too: swept. Certified. Signed off in triplicate. Men in reflective vests had walked it at dawn, boots crunching softly, eyes down, looking for the obvious things: bolts, birds, shrapnel from yesterday’s carelessness. They missed a strip of metal no longer than a man’s forearm. Titanium. Tough. Patient. Waiting. It lay there without intent, which is how most disasters begin. 

 The aircraft that dropped it had already gone. Lifted cleanly. Continued its day. Passengers settling into their seats, adjusting belts, thinking about meetings, dinners, hotel rooms. The metal had no passport. No manifest. No reason to be noticed. 

 Then came the other plane. White. Elegant. Too fast for forgiveness. A machine built to outrun time itself, skimming the edge of what metal and fuel would allow. Its wheels were doing what wheels have done since the first man decided to roll instead of walk—bearing weight, trusting the ground. 

 One of its tires hit the strip. 

 At that speed, there is no such thing as impact. There is only transformation. Rubber ceased to be rubber. It became violence. A shock wave tore through the wheel well like a fist through paper. Fragments flew with the precision of shrapnel, obedient to physics and indifferent to prayers. 

 One piece struck the fuel tank. Fuel does not explode the way movies insist. It spills. It atomizes. It looks, briefly, like mist. And mist, when introduced to heat and friction and fate, becomes fire. 

 Someone in the cabin smelled it first. Not fear—fear comes later—but something chemical, sharp, unfamiliar. A smell with no context. A man glanced up from his newspaper. A woman tightened her grip on an armrest she hadn’t noticed holding. The engines were still roaring. The ground was still rushing by. The math was already finished. 

 In the cockpit, they knew. Of course, pilots always know before anyone else. Instruments speak their own language, one learned over years and paid for in nights away from home. The words came in lights and needles and numbers dropping where numbers should not drop. They did what pilots do. They tried. Which is to say, they fought the inevitable with checklists and muscle memory and will. 

 Fire climbed the fuselage. People on the ground would later say it was beautiful in a terrible way. A long arc of flame against the morning sky. A sound that didn’t fade when it should have. A silence afterward that pressed down on the chest. 

 The aircraft never made it out of the neighborhood. It did not disappear into abstraction. It fell among houses, among kitchens and backyards a small hotel and ordinary lives that had not signed up to be part of the story. Four people on the ground would learn that proximity is sometimes enough. 

 Afterward comes the sorting. Investigators arrive with notebooks and calm voices. They kneel. They photograph. They tag. They draw lines backward from the wreckage, following cause the way a hunter follows blood. 

They will say “chain of events.” 

They will say “contributing factors.” 

They will say “runway debris,” because language, like liability, prefers distance. 

 They will eventually find the guilty strip of jet age metal. They will note its composition. Titanium. They will trace it to an aircraft that departed earlier, to a design decision made years before, to a maintenance shortcut signed off with a pen that has long since run dry. 

They will debate whether the metal should have been there, whether anyone could have known, whether the risk was acceptable at the time. Acceptable to whom is never written down. 

 Families will gather in rooms that smell faintly of coffee and disinfectant. Names will be read aloud. 

Lives will be compressed into dates and occupations and the gentle lies of eulogy. 

Someone will say it was fate. Someone else will say it was nobody’s fault. 

Both will be wrong in ways that matter.

 Because this was not an act of God. It was an act of accumulation. A decision here. A cheaper part substituted there. A tolerance widened. A warning softened. A piece of metal freed from its purpose and left to wait. 

 Only one way to be born. 

 A million ways to die. 

 The morning--that morning chose metal over mercy.

The End.

Thomas Shess is the author of gritty noir novel "Cantina Psalms: available on online book outlets and soon to be released [Spring 2026]"Tough Love."

COFFEE BEANS & BEINGS / INTRO TO 100-YEAR-OLD ESSAY ON COFFEE'S UNIVERSAL APPEAL

Expatriate American writers Solita Solano (left) and Djuna Barnes enjoy coffee at a Paris sidewalk café in Montparnasse, circa 1928–1930. The street photograph, in a humanist style by Maurice-Louis Branger, captures everyday café life during the Roaring Twenties literary expatriate era.  

GUEST BLOG / By William H. Ukers, author of "All About Coffee, 1922--Civilization in its onward march has produced only three important non-alcoholic beverages—the extract of the tea plant, the extract of the cocoa bean, and the extract of the coffee bean. Leaves and beans—these are the vegetable sources of the world's favorite non-alcoholic table-beverages. Of the two, the tea leaves lead in total amount consumed; the coffee beans are second; and the cocoa beans are a distant third, although advancing steadily. 

But in international commerce the coffee beans occupy a far more important position than either of the others, being imported into non-producing countries to twice the extent of the tea leaves. All three enjoy a world-wide consumption, although not to the same extent in every nation; but where either the coffee bean or the tea leaf has established itself in a given country, the other gets comparatively little attention, and usually has great difficulty in making any advance. The cocoa bean, on the other hand, has not risen to the position of popular favorite in any important consuming country, and so has not aroused the serious opposition of its two rivals. 

Coffee is universal in its appeal. All nations do it homage. It has become recognized as a human necessity. It is no longer a luxury or an indulgence; it is a corollary of human energy and human efficiency. People love coffee because of its two-fold effect—the pleasurable sensation and the increased efficiency it produces. 

Coffee has an important place in the rational dietary of all the civilized peoples of earth. It is a democratic beverage. Not only is it the drink of fashionable society, but it is also a favorite beverage of the men and women who do the world's work, whether they toil with brain or brawn. It has been acclaimed "the most grateful lubricant known to the human machine," and "the most delightful taste in all nature." 

No "food drink" has ever encountered so much opposition as coffee. Given to the world by the church and dignified by the medical profession, nevertheless it has had to suffer from religious superstition and medical prejudice. During the thousand years of its development it has experienced fierce political opposition, stupid fiscal restrictions, unjust taxes, irksome duties; but, surviving all of these, it has triumphantly moved on to a foremost place in the catalog of popular beverages. 

But coffee is something more than a beverage. It is one of the world's greatest adjuvant foods. There are other auxiliary foods, but none that excels it for palatability and comforting effects, the psychology of which is to be found in its unique flavor and aroma. 

Men and women drink coffee because it adds to their sense of well-being. It not only smells good and tastes good to all mankind, heathen or civilized, but all respond to its wonderful stimulating properties. The chief factors in coffee goodness are the caffein content and the caffeol. Caffein supplies the principal stimulant. It increases the capacity for muscular and mental work without harmful reaction. The caffeol supplies the flavor and the aroma—that indescribable Oriental fragrance that wooes us through the nostrils, forming one of the principal elements that make up the lure of coffee. There are several other constituents, including certain innocuous so-called caffetannic acids, that, in combination with the caffeol, give the beverage its rare gustatory appeal. 

The year 1919 awarded coffee one of its brightest honors. An American general said that coffee shared with bread and bacon the distinction of being one of the three nutritive essentials that helped win the World War for the Allies. So this symbol of human brotherhood has played a not inconspicuous part in "making the world safe for democracy." The new age, ushered in by the Peace of Versailles and the Washington Conference, has for its hand-maidens temperance and self-control. It is to be a world democracy of right-living and clear thinking; and among its most precious adjuncts are coffee, tea, and cocoa—because these beverages must always be associated with rational living, with greater comfort, and with better cheer. 

Like all good things in life, the drinking of coffee may be abused. Indeed, those having an idiosyncratic susceptibility to alkaloids should be temperate in the use of tea, coffee, or cocoa. In every high-tensioned country there is likely to be a small number of people who, because of certain individual characteristics, can not drink coffee at all. These belong to the abnormal minority of the human family. 

Some people can not eat strawberries; but that would not be a valid reason for a general condemnation of strawberries. One may be poisoned, says Thomas A. Edison, from too much food. Horace Fletcher was certain that over-feeding causes all our ills. Over-indulgence in meat is likely to spell trouble for the strongest of us. 

Coffee is, perhaps, less often abused than wrongly accused. It all depends. A little more tolerance! Trading upon the credulity of the hypochondriac and the caffein-sensitive, in recent years there has appeared in America and abroad a curious collection of so-called coffee substitutes. They are "neither fish nor flesh, nor good red herring." Most of them have been shown by official government analyses to be sadly deficient in food value—their only alleged virtue. 

One of our contemporary attackers of the national beverage bewails the fact that no palatable hot drink has been found to take the place of coffee. The reason is not hard to find. There can be no substitute for coffee. Dr. Harvey W. Wiley has ably summed up the matter by saying, "A substitute should be able to perform the functions of its principal. A substitute to a war must be able to fight. A bounty-jumper is not a substitute." 

It has been the aim of the author to tell the whole coffee story for the general reader, yet with the technical accuracy that will make it valuable to the trade. The book is designed to be a work of useful reference covering all the salient points of coffee's origin, cultivation, preparation, and development, its place in the world's commerce and in a rational dietary. 

Good coffee, carefully roasted and properly brewed, produces a natural beverage that, for tonic effect, can not be surpassed, even by its rivals, tea and cocoa. Here is a drink that ninety-seven percent of individuals find harmless and wholesome, and without which life would be drab indeed—a pure, safe, and helpful stimulant compounded in nature's own laboratory, and one of the chief joys of life!