To reuniting the flames of this

It was 7:30 when Beth arrived in the airport. She settled herself into a stiff airport chair quietly and awaited her plane. She had a long while to wait; she had been unable to get a ride any other time, but she had prepared by bringing her mp3 player and a paperback copy of Siddhartha. As a budding Buddhist and longtime reader, she was exploring her newfound spirituality through classic books like those of Kerouac and Hesse.
As the beat came in on The Island, things began to go awry for Beth. There were still but few people in the terminal; hers was the first leaving there that day, but among them were a few who threw Beth off her ease. Not knowing what exactly did this to her, she turned back to her book.
At a sharp pain in the back of her head, she whirled around to face behind her, her long hair sweeping in a wide arc to settle on her shoulders. She reached her hand up to touch her head, but felt nothing. Realizing the pain was internal, she began to turn around again, but something caught her eye. Down the hall, standing by a newspaper stand that had not opened yet, was a man in a tan suit, carrying a briefcase. He felt her gaze, and turned away.
Beth looked away and dug in her purse for a bottle of painkillers. Sliding her things under her seat, she got up and headed for the bathroom. The bathroom, smelling of cleaning chemicals and still slightly shimmery from its recent mopping, was not out of the ordinary for airport bathrooms.
However, for Beth, it had the odd, almost dead atmosphere that modern buildings have when one is alone and tired. An atmosphere created by the silence, silence that is very much worse than the silence one finds outside or in old buildings because it is the silence created by the soft padding of the air conditioning. And the floors, the floors are not meant to be warm and inviting; they are cold and lifeless. The near-perfect maintenance of the bathroom gave it the impression that Beth could have been the first person to enter; there were no echoes of voices long dead here.
Of course Beth would never have noticed these things were she in the middle of a busy day, well awake, with friends perhaps, or even strangers. Beth’s friends were a very vibrant sort, the kind of women you might have seen in fabric stores or other sorts of social gathering places; the type who catch up extensively on frivolous gossip at the supermarket and loudly pass ignorant opinions to whoever could not avoid hearing them.
Beth did not associate with these people by choice; they were really the only people she could be seen with in public; the small town she lived would not permit her to hang out with the few artistically and spiritually awake people in town: those who were not old enough to leave it.
Throwing the pills in her mouth, Beth cupped her hands together and got a drink from the sink. Just then, another woman entered the bathroom. She was tall, with black hair and black and white clothes. Gesturing quietly, the sink opened up before her, and, plugging her nose, she took the plunge. Reddening at first around the mouth, the corpuscles spread broadly around her face, not concentrating in any one area. This of course troubled Beth, because this woman had died a very long time ago
“Why, whatever are YOU doing here? ” inquired the aghast Beth.
The woman, rubbing her womanly thighs against Beth’s purse, replied “This is MY home, Beth, dear. I don’t see why you can’t understand all that; you’ve known this would happen since we were in school together ”
At this point, the man Beth had seen earlier emerged on the scene. It happened as quite a surprise for Beth, when the man’s head emerged seemingly from the woman’s hip, although it was soon apparent to her that his entire body was there as well, hiding behind the tall woman’s billowy dress. The man spoke up to Beth from his hip position.
“Do you know who I am, Beth? You remember the stories, don’t you?”
“Yes, Beth you really ought to remember the stories, from school, dear.”
At this point the memories came flooding back to Beth: She knew the man and his mythic stature, and the woman, and how she came to be here, even after her untimely death at Beth’s side decades ago. She knew why the woman had not aged, and she knew what exactly was in the man’s briefcase. . .