Hook
A night-shift lost-luggage clerk at a regional airport starts opening the bags no one ever comes to claim — not to steal, but because each one is a complete, abandoned life she can try on for a week before the next flight lands.
Escalation
- She perfects the ritual: return the bag to the carousel by dawn, live as its owner by night — cooking a stranger's spice blend, wearing their reading glasses, finishing the half-written letter in the side pocket.
- One suitcase contains her own maiden name sewn into a coat she never owned, and a boarding pass for a flight she has no memory of taking.
- Tracing the tag, she finds the bag was checked from a city she's never visited, by a woman photographed at gates on three continents — always in the background, always facing away.
- The airport's records show the unclaimed count rising every night she works, as if her ritual is summoning bags that were never on any manifest.
✦ Twist
The bags aren't lost — they're the belongings of everyone who died mid-transit and never got to arrive; she's not a clerk but the last stop, and the coat with her name means her own bag is somewhere on the belt, waiting for someone to try her on.
💡 The engine is the carousel as purgatory — an endless loop that turns 'whose is this?' into 'who am I?'