Sara married an unattractive man because her mother told her to. “Attractive men always check their reflection in the mirror,” her mother liked to state non-facts as facts, “that’s how life is going to be if you marry a handsome man. They will be in front and everyone else is just the backdrop to their beauty.” So she listened to her mother, because things said as facts registered that way to Sara. She married a man with a cratered face, the frame of a lamppost and a forehead that began in the middle of his head. He was like an old Spanish priest with a history of pedophilia. Her mother was right. He was always by her side. By her side and on his Blackberry. He scrolls through his Blackberry with the immovable focus of a Jedi master, ignoring the piercing scream that pulls on the hairs at the back of Sara’s neck.
“Mommy! Mommy! Where’d you put my water?” yells her 4-year old daughter from the far end of the room. The toddler’s arms flap in the air in a vain attempt to reach for the zipper on her backpack. Her tiny palms slap the bobbing head of Dora the Explorer. Dora is unfazed and so is the toddler. Instantly distracted by a whizzing thought, the toddler shoots towards her mother, shoots back to the end of the room, back to her mother, screaming like a baby missile without a target,
“Mommy! Where are we going? Where’s the plane? OLA! AMIGOS! Ride the plane! Ride the plane!” Strangers shake their head and frown, Sara shrinks into the line of disapproving stares. She tries to catch her loose missile but is slapped in the face by a saliva covered palm. The infant strapped to her chest wails, pestered by the sudden movement. The 4-year old joins her screams, a galling choir of deafening destruction.
Her husband’s selective hearing has tuned out the frequency of their children’s screams and continues to type on his Blackberry, unperturbed. “Shut them up mom,” says a teenager who once lived in her womb, she barely recognized the boy with the rolly eyes and the iPod ears. He used to look like me, Sara thought. The boy shoves her forward as the line begins to move and Sara pulls her hobbling Samsonite down the aisle, praying the airline doesn’t charge her for all the extra baggage.