And this is how it ends for Amelia Earhart; and this is how it begins for me.

August, 2010

Sam sat in the deck chair facing the bay. The wind blew sweet and pure at her. It was still, so early only the birds and joggers were up. Morning at the very tip of the Cape. She held newsprint in her hands; a soon to be anachronism, but reading the daily paper was a sacred ritual for her. It proved she’d had a life before. Sam read every word of the story. An intrepid team of explorers had finally found Amelia. A piece of cloth they’d dug up had been analyzed, this strip of disintegrated fabric buried for over sixty years. The DNA recovered from it clearly matched that of a descendant; whoever it was, a niece, a nephew, a cousin, had chosen to remain anonymous. Sam thought of Jurassic Park with all those carefully crystallized specimens cloned and reanimated. Amelia as an exhibit alive and well and living in Orlando. If people chose to have their dead pets resurrected, why not a famous aviatrix?
Seeing it like this made her realized the moral implications; where did one actually draw the line? Dead husbands? Stillborn children?
Luckily science wasn’t nearly that advanced.
She read the story over, and couldn’t believe it was true. The team had found the remnant on an island three hundred and fifty miles away from Howland, flying all that way to end on an anonymous beach. Sam didn’t want this to be the final word. Sad to imagine that striking woman, left hungry and pale, awaiting rescue, fading away slowly. Better for her to have gone in a flash. She told herself the proof wouldn’t be enough. There were always doubters. They’d argue that it was a set up, that the science was faulty. Who believed in science in this day and age when even elected members of congress in this country were convinced that human beings had roamed the earth with those self same dinosaurs.