**WATTYS 2022 WINNER** Seventeen-year-old Evelyn Werth is on an endless flight from hell. She's the only person onboard Aloha Airways Flight 1333 who's caught in a 28-minute time loop.
During each cycle, four things happen:
1. The Internet goes out...
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Loop 1
Suddenly the tip of the plane tilts forward and before I know what's happening, I'm falling. The whole plane is falling.
We're being thrown straight out of the sky.
The plane rattles wildly as it falls. My eyes squeeze shut as my stomach lurches, tumbling over itself. Nausea bubbles with terror, and my heart pounds in my ears, screaming at me. Or maybe I'm the one screaming? There's no time to think, no time to do anything except grip the armrests, squeezing them until my fingers drain of color.
It only lasts a second, and then there's nothing.
I open one eye, then the other, and glance around me. Everything is completely normal. The plane is suddenly level again, coasting along like it wasn't nearly vertical just seconds ago. I'm surrounded by an eerie, disturbing calm.
Except for the hip hop music blasting in my ears.
In surprise, I pull out my earbuds.
My head swings to the aisle, but it's empty. No one's there. The girl is gone, and there's no sign of any struggle. No blood on the ground, no crashed cart. It's like it never happened. Any of it. It all disappeared, like I blinked away a bad thought.
What on earth?
I rub my eyes, toying with the earbuds in between my fingers. I can't remember putting them in and turning my music back on. How did they end up in my ears again?
It must've been a crazy dream. The new meds I started last week make me insanely tired and lull me into a very deep sleep. But that... was next level insanity. I never experienced anything remotely like that before.
It felt way too real to be a dream.
"Sorry folks," the pilot's voice calls out. "We've lost Internet connection. It will hopefully be back up soon. And please remain in your seats, we're approaching a patch of turbulence."
I wasn't listening to music when it happened, so it must've been a dream, I tell myself, reason taking the reins again, knowing that there's no other feasible possibility here. The plane is obviously not crashing and no one around me is concerned in the slightest. So, it was clearly some lucid sleep-deprived dream.
I take a deep breath, and stretch my arms overhead. A baby wails somewhere behind me for a few seconds, and then there's silence.
My mind flashes back to the girl with a bloody nose and big brown eyes, held roughly by two men, restrained as if she was a criminal. Or a terrorist. Or something even worse. I've seen viral videos of things like that. Deranged or drunk passengers who go apeshit for some unknown reason, and have a complete mental breakdown in the middle of a flight.
