Annette

Annette is a former Lufthansa flight attendant among the people stranded at Severn City Airport after air travel stops. In the airport’s improvised community, she teaches Clark French; later, her death from an unknown illness leaves a personal mark on the landscape he has watched change for two decades.

Life at the Airport

By Day Eighty, people who had arrived without English were learning it in informal groups, while English speakers studied languages brought to the airport by international airlines. Annette taught French to Clark, who practiced it while hauling water, washing clothes, skinning deer, building bonfires, and cleaning. Their lessons belonged to the ordinary labor of survival: new words were rehearsed alongside the repeated chores that made a life at the airport possible.

Annette had worked as a Lufthansa flight attendant. The airport’s multinational population made her language knowledge useful within a makeshift system of exchange, in which people learned from one another rather than from formal teachers or institutions.

Scarcity and Conversation

The loss of ordinary supplies shaped Annette’s life as much as the language lessons did. She had run out of nicotine patches on Day Four. During a particularly difficult stretch weeks later, she tried smoking cinnamon from the airport coffee kiosk. The improvised substitute conveys how even a familiar dependence had become subject to the dwindling resources and improvised solutions of the stranded community.

When Garrett asked whether anyone had a cigarette and began listing illnesses that could become fatal without medicine, Annette answered with dry humor before turning to another consequence of the vanished medical system: no more chemotherapy. Her response linked the immediate absence of cigarettes to the larger loss of treatments that had once made serious illnesses survivable.

Death and Remembrance

Annette died in Year Seventeen of an unknown illness. By Year Nineteen, Clark was seventy, moving slowly and living with constant awareness of death; he wore Annette’s Lufthansa neck scarf in her memory. Their friendship therefore persists in a practical, visible object, carried into his later life at the airport.

From his armchair in the museum, Clark could see the graveyard between Runways Six and Seven, where each grave was marked by an airplane tray table. He had left wildflowers on Annette’s grave that morning, and their blue and purple formed a small, distinct mark in the view. The scarf and flowers make remembrance part of the airport’s everyday setting: Annette is gone, but her place in Clark’s life remains legible among the graves, aircraft, gardens, and forest he has watched for twenty years.