The airplane seat pocket

Four items, on a typical short flight, is the average census of a seat pocket: the safety card, laminated and unread since the aircraft entered service; the inflight magazine, or its absence, a magazine having been quietly discontinued by most carriers so that the pocket now looks faintly bereft without it; a boarding pass belonging to someone on an earlier flight, folded once; and a single object left by a stranger, which might be a water bottle, a paperback abandoned at its least interesting chapter, a napkin, a phone charger cable coiled with real care, or, memorably, a child's single shoe. The pocket itself is a shallow net of fabric mesh or vinyl, mounted low, angled to catch rather than hold, and it succeeds at catching more than holding: turbulence and the general angle of descent conspire to spill its contents onto the floor with some regularity, at which point the contents are gathered by the next passenger and returned to the pocket without inspection, a quiet act of custodianship nobody asked for. Nothing in the pocket was placed there on purpose by the airline except the safety card, and even that gets pushed to the back within a flight or two, buried under what strangers leave. It is the only storage space on the aircraft that fills itself.

Marion Vale