To the Man Watching Porn at the Fort Lauderdale Airport by MJ Tuttle
“To the Man Watching Porn at the Fort Lauderdale Airport” is one of three editors’ choice selections for the CRAFT 2023 Flash Prose Prize, guest judged by Kathy Fish. Our editors chose these pieces as exemplars of the power of flash prose to convey complexity of emotion within the constraints of concision.
In her piece “To the Man Watching Porn at the Fort Lauderdale Airport,” trans writer and filmmaker MJ Tuttle employs lyrical language to ask questions about the nature of human connection. Why do strangers sometimes gravitate toward one another? What do we hope to find? The author uses a fleeting airport interaction between a narrator and an unnamed man to consider how “temporary realities” of certain spaces “reduce the world down to a building, or a room, or the space between two people.” Their interaction is, paradoxically, both anonymous and intimate; radical and mundane; dangerous and protective. Throughout the piece, the narrator watches a looped fishing show on an airport screen as part of an apt metaphor designed to deepen our questions about their interaction. Who is in control? Who is fishing, and who is being caught? The author resists easy answers, and instead allows the reader to ponder these questions. In the end, it is the reader who is reeled in by the narrator’s affecting portrayal of human connection in this extraordinary slice-of-life piece. —CRAFT
“I like your look,” you say, cradling your laptop, maneuvering past the jutting armrests to sit next to me.
“Thanks.” I put a limp bundle of shoestring fries into my mouth.
The armrests, you explain, are to keep people from sleeping.
“I like to imagine they are real arms,” you say, showing me how to crawl under them.
Your OD green sliding underneath them makes me imagine all the worse places you’ve slept. I know you would tell me if I asked, but I don’t.
“One arm at the chest, at the hips, over the ankles,” you say, slapping the leather on top. “Locked and loaded!”
I nod and say something about fishing, because I think that’s what people do here. There’s a man eternally fishing on the television down the hall. The same twenty-minute loop. Twenty-two fish per loop. One hundred and seventy-six fish till my flight to Raleigh.
“Fishing!” you say like you’ve got one on the line.
You show me your computer, pictures of your cousins holding a mahi-mahi somewhere offshore. It was your birthday, you say. Dirty, poor, unsmiling men with round faces, heavy hands, like you. Not like the television man, with his big sunglasses and corny Joe Biden smile. Your birthday mahi was gaped and fluorescent, colors I’d only seen together on running shoes. Its expression between Fuck and Where am I?
Behind the photos, an open browser window shows a GIF of a hentai woman with an eyepatch being plugged repeatedly with a giant purple dick. Cum in seconds, the ad dares. Or warns? It weirds me out how much she looks like me—or we have the same haircut. I notice the chain of tabs that surround the fish one. Only the first few letters are visible but I get the idea: Stepd, Blowj, Sexy Cu.
You return your computer to your lap as the grates fall over the Steak ’n Shake, The Duty Free Shop, Tropical News. They crash into the tile, the metal tinkling.
“No more hamburgers tonight,” you say, taking off your boots.
“Guess not.”
We talk a bit longer—stoner thoughts from you mostly—then I say, “I’m going to go walk around.”
“It was really nice talking to you,” you say.
“You too,” I say, and find another bench.
At three in the morning, I wake up to a man riding an orange floor buffer. I’m annoyed, then mesmerized by the track of gloss he leaves behind. It takes me a minute to realize where I am. My backpack is under my head, and my shoelaces are tied to my other bag the way you instructed. I untie myself and walk up the empty corridor toward you. I stop to watch the man on the television catch another fish that swims through the air. This one is all Fuck. I use the bathroom—pee, wash my face, brush my teeth with my finger—all trying to hold my breath. It reeks of Lysol. I return to one of your stoner thoughts and think you were right. Nothing here feels real.
You are down the empty hall, awake, the buffer passing you now, the laptop’s blue light on your face. We are the only two people staying overnight in the Fort Lauderdale Airport. You do not see me. You are concentrating on something else. I confess, I am glad you are still here.
MJ TUTTLE is a trans writer and filmmaker originally from North Carolina. Feature films she has written and directed have screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, Los Angeles Film Festival, Rooftop Films, International Film Festival of India, and all over the world. She is an MFA candidate at Bennington College and an adjunct faculty member at The New School and Adelphi University. She was a finalist for the 2023 Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest and lives in New Mexico and New York.
Featured image by Briana Tozour, courtesy of Unsplash.
