One fine day in May, the Colorado airport security checkpoint was staffed by a new 20-year-old TSA agent, fresh-faced and hopeful, about to complete his last shift of training. His mind harkened back to the grim expression on his trainer's face that morning, when he promised him that today was the day that "makes or breaks you" as a TSA agent. Steeling his nerves, the young agent began guiding the passengers through the metal detectors when all of a sudden a massive, hulking beast sporting an ill-fitting, garish tank top and thin gray shorts that seem to disappear completely near the waist walks up. The beast gives the agent a crooked, one-sided smirk with comically raised eyebrows, accentuating the craters and scars on his enormous fivehead. He spreads his massive arms to his sides, gleefully awaiting to be touched by anything with a pulse. Its sad, asymmetrical, saggy breasts shift to point at 4 and 11 o'clock, and a heavy tuft of wiry armpit hair, newly exposed, wafted an air of rancid animal waste. The poor, overworked TSA agent reluctantly approaches and begins waving the metal detector wand about the beast's forearms, stomach, back, and as it went below the creature's turgid gunt, it began emitting a fevered siren.
The agent choked down a gulp and looked up at the creature, who seemed pleased at the reaction it was getting. In a deep and craggy voice, it calmly reassured the agent, "Oh, I think that's my dilating wand...part of it broke off a few weeks ago. Just girly things, hehe! ....gosh, are you going to have to pull me aside and...frisk me?

"
A simmering mass of vomit and bile, fierce enough to burn a hole through the fuselage, began to rise up the agent's mouth. Choking it down and screwing his courage, he replied simply,
"It's okay, you're clear s-"
The beast's face contorted into a scowl and he began to glare at the young agent with all its blaze of basilisk hate. As its lip began to quiver, the agent rushed to correct himself: "You're clear ma'am."
As soon as the creature lumbered on past the checkpoint, the agent turned toward his station and began to fight back a wave of dry-heaving. For he had just come face to face with the terror known only as...
THE AMHOLE AT 37,000 FEET