Step 1: takes place in an invented country
Step 2: includes this sentence: Then, he visited a fortune teller
Step 3: starts with this dialogue: "Why are you so late?"
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Carla's flight had been uneventful, though somehow off-putting in ways she couldn't enumerate in her first email home to her parents. She sensed, rather than knew, that she was the only American on the plane to Murlinia, and she assumed that everyone else had the same thought: why was she there?
The man sitting beside her had been pleasant and tried to engage her in conversation. When he realized she didn't speak his language, he shifted to English, though his look told her it was incumbent on her to have learned Murlinian as she was traveling there. He chatted about his children, who were anxious for his safe return. Before he left, his wife had had a terrible dream in which he died in a terrible car accident while in New York on business. Then, he had visited a fortune teller, and she also saw his death, but in a mugging. He said felt fairly secure now that he was off of New York soil and headed back home, but how does one really know? Carla had no answer for him, and so they continued the rest of the flight in silence.
Walking into the airport terminal, Carla felt her foreignness radiate from her body like a shiny force field that both attracted attention and pushed people a certain distance away from wherever she stood. She wandered among the gates until she finally understood from the drawings on the signs where to go to meet her ride.
Outside stood a row of orange cars that had the appearance of taxis, and beyond them a row of black official cars with drivers in uniforms holding signs. The sign furthest to the left read "Carla Bickford" and she made her way toward it.
"Why are you so late?" the driver said, grabbing her single bag and shoving it into the trunk. He made no move to open the door for her, so she began to open the passenger side door.
"In the back!" he said as he opened the driver side door and slid inside.
She climbed into the rear seat and sat diagonally from him. The car peeled out from the curb as she struggled to buckle the seatbelt.
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