Surveillance Society? Big Brother? You ain't seen nothing yet! New fiction on the Grievous Angel

A chilling story – Report Any Suspicious Activity by Pat Tompkins – that could all too soon become reality if the current trends for Surveillance Society and the world of Big Brother continue along their present path. Pat Tompkins is an editor in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her shortest fiction has appeared in Nanoism, Mslexia, KYSO Flash, and other publications.


​​Report Any Suspicious Activity
by Pat Tompkins

The airport at Kona was more patios than buildings. Still, it had a security check, so Anna surrendered her bottle of water. As she sat outside, waiting to board, she tracked the rising moon, not quite full, like a freshwater pearl dangling above palm trees. Her fellow passengers were hunched over cell phones.

For the six-hour flight to California, Anna had a new paperback novel, but it wasn’t grabbing her. She’d never been able to sleep on planes. At her window seat, she watched cloud shadows on the ocean until nightfall. 

From her purse, she withdrew a paper notebook and pen. During the past week in Hawaii, she had made notes but focused on exploring – snorkeling, beachcombing, hiking – not recording. Now she could reflect and write. She began jotting things she’d seen that might inspire a poem or essay: the seahorse farm, stargazing atop Mauna Kea, petroglyphs, manta rays. 

Anna was absorbed in her scribbling when a flight attendant asked if she wanted something to drink. “Yes, thanks. Tea?”

“Sure thing. Milk and sugar?”

“Just milk.”

The woman handed over a small cup. She nodded toward Anna’s notebook and said,

“You don’t see that much anymore.”

“Guess I’m old-fashioned,” Anna said.

Certainly old. Also less than current, partly because she had no children or grandchildren. Long ago she’d have tried kite surfing; now, snorkeling was adventurous. She had snorkeled daily, hoping to spot giant sea turtles. On the fourth day, she spied one a few feet away; it swam along, completely disinterested in her; then she’d seen another and followed it past coral walls; she trailed a third, losing track of time, aware only of the turtle.

A cold current had jolted her out of her reverie, and when she popped her head up, the shore was a distant smudge. No one knew where she was. You weren’t supposed to snorkel alone. Swimming slowly, Anna worked her way back to the beach.

Floating beside turtles resembled how she felt when her writing went well. She entered another world. For Anna, that rarely happened with a keyboard, so she liked to use a pen and paper, drawing words with ink.  

The young couple next to Anna had barely glanced up from their screens. He played games on a laptop and she watched a movie on a tiny rectangle. Glancing at her watch, Anna realized she’d been sitting three hours. Time to stretch her legs.

She strolled the narrow aisle twice; passengers who weren’t sleeping used electronic devices to work or distract themselves. No one wrote with a pen; they just tapped thumbs. Anna recalled when airplanes offered a selection of magazines, back when meals were free and there was no photo ID requirement. Hawaii was her first vacation in years. 

After crawling over the couple to return to her seat, she resumed writing in her notebook. The man beside her stared at her. Anna glanced at him. He seemed annoyed. Then the flight attendant came by, collecting cups; Anna felt her stare, too. OK, she conceded. What she was doing was unusual but not noisy or harmful. 

Perhaps it wasn’t done in public anymore. Or maybe they were jealous, lacking the skill. Anna had heard that some people under 30 barely knew how to use a pen, aside from signing their name. 

In a poem about snorkeling, she included some Hawaiian words. She’d made a list of fish: moana, nunu, kahala, ala‘ihi, kihikihi, and the triggerfish called humuhumunukunukuapua‘a. Sea turtle: honu, whale: kohola. Writing poems helped her connect things and pay attention. Maybe Shelley was right in declaring, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” 

By the time they landed, she had first drafts of several new poems. The flight attendant asked her to wait while others disembarked. Before Anna could ask why, the woman moved away. The couple in her row exchanged a “told you so” look.

A security guard escorted her off the plane. He took her to a room and asked for her notebook. “I don’t understand,” Anna said. 

“Your notebook, please.”

She pulled it from her purse with a sweaty hand, reluctant to release it. The list of fish names fell out.

“What’s this?” He squinted at the words. “Some sort of code?”

She hoped he was joking, but his face said he wasn’t.
 
“We consider this,” he indicated the notebook, “unpatriotic. The government can’t track handwriting. Why were you using a pen?”