Nothing to Declare
by Harlan Booth
Copyright© 2026 by Harlan Booth
Humor Story: A routine TSA screening goes quietly, awkwardly wrong
Tags: Fiction AI Generated
I was in line with everyone else, which is to say I was holding my shoes and a belt in one hand, my wallet and boarding pass in the other, and pretending that this was all normal. The line moved in the way lines move at airports: in small shuffles, punctuated by the soft, continuous scolding of overhead announcements. A woman in front of me was negotiating with a carry-on that did not want to be smaller. A man behind me was narrating his own compliance to no one in particular. I had already placed my phone and keys in a gray bin and watched them disappear into the mouth of the X-ray machine. There was nothing to think about. This is the point of the system. You think about it later, if at all.
When it was my turn, I stepped up, put my shoes and belt into a second bin, and waited for the scanner to clear. The agent waved me forward with the same motion you use to wave a car through a four-way stop when you don’t care who goes first. I positioned myself on the little footprints. The machine hummed. The world was fluorescent and procedural and smelled faintly of rubber mats.
“Dude,” I said, because that is apparently how I begin sentences now, “I think I’m going to set that thing off.”
It felt like a courtesy. The way you tell someone their tail light is out. The way you warn a cashier that the bill you’re handing over is torn. The agent stopped moving.
“Why would you set it off?” he asked.
It was a fair question, and one I had not prepared an answer for, because until a second earlier I had not been under the impression that I was about to be interrogated by a man with a wand. I hesitated in the doorway of the machine, which is a bad place to hesitate. He gestured me back.
“Step back, sir.”
I stepped back.
He reached for the wand.
The wand is like a lie detector for pockets. He ran it along my side. It was silent. He ran it along my other side. Still nothing. He ran it down my leg. Nothing. Then he ran it across the front of me, and the wand made a small, cheerful sound, like a microwave that has finished warming soup.
He ran it again. It made the same sound.
He ran it a third time, slower. He paused.
“Sir,” he said, and the word sir was doing a lot of work, “what do you have there?”
This was the point at which I realized that I had skipped a step. I had warned him. I had not explained. I had assumed that warning was the same thing as explanation. It is not. He was now looking at me as if I had told him I was about to trip an alarm and then done so on purpose.
“I have-” I started, and stopped, because I could not figure out how to finish the sentence in a way that would improve anything. I tried again. “It’s just-”
He raised his voice slightly, without meaning to. “Sir, what is it?”
“I told you I was going to set it off.”
“Yes, you did. And now it has gone off. So what is it?”
Behind me, someone cleared their throat. Somewhere to my left, a bin clattered.
“It’s ... a piercing,” I said, which was both true and unhelpful.
He didn’t react in any way that suggested he had been trained for this. He did not react in any way that suggested he had not been. He just looked at me and then at the wand and then back at me, as if the three of us were engaged in a small, formal negotiation.
“What kind of piercing?” he asked.
I had the brief, unearned hope that there was a right answer to this.
“I- it’s-” I said. I was aware, dimly, that this was no longer a private conversation. The line had slowed. A woman two people back was pretending to be very interested in the bins. The agent’s colleague had stopped and was also pretending to be very interested in the bins.
“What kind of piercing, sir?”
“It’s a Prince Albert piercing,” I said.
There. The word sat between us, ordinary and uncooperative. It did not soften. It did not clarify. It did not explain itself. It was just a noun.
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