Grounded and grafted to her oxygen machine in life, death offers her the freedom of the skies, air miles for eternity, the right to roam the globe. Cold katabatic winds of the Antarctic sweep her across the whiteness of McMurdo Sound. Concurrently, a harmattan escorts her over Africa. She goes club-class on cyclones in the China sea, hitches a lift aboard a bucket-shop chinook to Colorado. Landing criteria do not apply to her; cross-winds at Hong Kong International; dense freezing fog at Charles de Gaulle; wake turbulence on finals for Colombo; Vera negotiates them all with the assurance of a veteran 747 captain. Passport control she treats as a complete irrelevance. Armed border guards from Kashmir to T’aipei neglect to bat an eyelid as she sashays past. Observant immigration officers at Heathrow fail to spot her on surveillance screens. Her appetite for tourism is insatiable. From overcrowded Delhi to the isolation of Severnaya Zemlya, from Alice Springs to Omdurman and Easter Island, Vera is everywhere, like God and Coca Cola. by Peter Wyton

art by Peter Schwartz