There must be a reason!

By Emmanuelle

Whenever she travels from home to somewhere near or far, as in minutes or hours or days or weeks away, she always makes it a point to reserve a place for herself by the window – be it car, van, bus, boat or balloon.

Disaster has no other name for it if this situation were not so situated.

And we are not speaking here of ordinary tantrums. If and when reservations for window seats happened to have all gone out, you sit still and watch. Better still, you watch out. For yourself.

She bits her lips with her teeth until one would think her lips and her teeth were tightly married in war and peace and back to war. She juts out her jaws, she breathes wide her nostrils. She slits her eyes, she clenches her fists. She buts herself forehead forward, and really goes for it. Spit-fired goes the bullet.

She plunks herself there, right down the window seat. Finding a person or a thing ahead of her there, she grabs the person or a thing and dumps the person or a thing far and away like so much lightweight baggage. Poor person or a thing.

Or she curves those fingers and shoots out those nails so stiff and sharp from so much calcium in the milk. Like, four big glasses a day. Whole not skimmed.

It will be a fight to the death for that window seat. And woe to that someone or something who was there or been tossed there first.

Sometimes, she surprises even herself. She climbs over and plops herself on the lap of the person or on top of the thing. Until that person or that thing gets the hint. And the person or the thing jumps or slides or slithers away, shamed and mortified to splotches of varying reds and purples. To melt or simply disappear in sweats and tears or blustering wrath, and swaths and swaths of that.

The neighbors, beside and back and opposite and forward seats, with no exemption, would rub their hand against the other hand in scrub-washing motions. Or wring their hands in the air, or tsk-tsk or clack-clack their tongues and teeth. Or widen their eyes and look at each other thinking the same thought, agreeing to agree for once.

Would not it be nice, so heavenly toothily sweetly nice, to pluck this girl out of her nice heavenly toothily sweet window seat and throw her out of the window, all of the windows, all at the same time, in fact? Would you not think so? Hmmmmm?

And the neighbors, beside and back and opposite and forward seats, with no exemption, would be extending far their necks, stretching out their hands, curving those fingers, shooting out sharp hard nails. Their eyes would be firing out flames, their breaths too.

And there you are, mother, pleading for mercy for a life. Not yours. Hers.

There must be a reason she is that, like that, just that. And there is not a window wide enough to push out your fat. You are the reason, mother. And that’s that.

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