The Passport

Tim Davis carries a passport with him in his burgundy leather briefcase. Its pages are blotted with the ink from green stamps, and red stamps, and blue stamps, and yellow stamps, and even one orange stamp. His necktie strangles him when he tries to sleep on the planes, but he won’t loosen it. Loose neckties are sleazy. 

He reads a National Geographic while waiting for his plane to board and watches a woman uncross and cross her legs while reading a Vogue. Her son squirms in the next seat, his shoes untied and his nose running. He smears the snot off his nose and wipes his hand on his shorts. Tim looks at the boy, creasing his eyebrows, and frowns. The boy picks his nose again and wipes the boogers on his tongue. “Hmph,” Tim mumbles, and looks down again, at the naked, indigenous women of Chad. 

“I wanna snack,” the boy pulls his mothers arm, knocking the magazine out of her hands.

“You’re on my last nerve. You just had a snack. Enough,” she says, pulling his arm off and pushing his belly back into his seat. 

Tim Davis sweeps her Vogue off the floor and shakes his head: “Kids!” he smiles. “Thank you.”

“I do what I can,” he laughs, and gives her a wink. He looks at her long legs and imagines them over his head. 

She frowns and turns to her boy, “Are you excited to see Daddy?” she asks, and then glances at Tim. 

“Yes,” says the boy, plainly, now knocking his feet together.

Tim clears his throat and turns his body away from her, while slipping his magazine into his burgundy leather briefcase. He feels around for his passport, and when he finds it, he flips through the pages to admire the different colors. Every color has a feel and a smell and a taste. 

Each stamp, a woman; Yolanda was a Mexican green stamp. Her skin tasted like cocoa butter and her hair was soft and black. When he fucked her she screamed, “Dios!” her arms bound to the bedposts and her legs spread; her eyes were shut until she came, when she opened them to a suffering Jesus Christ hanging over her bed. Afterwards, Christ stared down at Tim with raised eyebrows and a pained scowl. Never one to be judged, Tim left the sleeping Mexican woman before they could get dressed for mass. 

Marie was a French red stamp and an atheist. Her eyes were the color of the sea, and her lips tasted like wine, and she wanted the lights off, and that was okay with him, as long as she locked the dog in the other room. There was nothing less sexy than the heavy breathing of an old pug, his lazy eyes wandering over their naked bodies. And when Tim left, the dog’s barks followed him out the door and down the stairs, but the dog’s barks were little moans compared to the screams of the husbands.

Yan Li was a Chinese orange stamp, and her dress was orange, too. Her house smelled like burnt rice but her hair smelled like flowers. Tim hated how noisy China had been, all of the lights and the cars and the people. Yan Li was everything that China was not: quiet, soft, and patient. So when the bedroom door swung open and cracked the wall, Tim shrieked embarrassingly at China itself: a built man with a black ponytail, who ripped the bed sheets away and spanked Tim Davis’ ass out of his house.

He had never been spanked before; though he had spanked many. One of which was a blue stamp, a Czechoslovakian widow named Selma. She was used to being smacked around and though she had many scars, when Tim Davis said, “Are you sure?” she said, “Abso-fuckin’-lutely.” When he left, he noticed a National Geographic on her kitchen table. He took it.

“All passengers in executive class, please board now with your ticket and passport ready,” says a voice over intercom.

Tim Davis locks his burgundy leather briefcase and walks toward a flight attendant who is scanning tickets.

“Hello, Sir, how are you today?”

“Very good, thank you, and yourself?”

“Mmmhm,” she says, while scanning his ticket and flipping through his passport, observing all of the stamps until her fingers touch his picture.

“Well, you’ve been around, haven’t you!” she exclaims.

“I guess I have,” he says, while smiling at her breasts.