with jailhouse hooch.
“The sizes are on the wall, ma’am,” the register demon said.
“Hey, could you step on it?” the man behind her said.
“I’m sorry, I don’t have my glasses with me,” the woman said.
“A Grande,” the man behind her said. “You want a fucking Grande.”
The woman recoiled. Without her protective coating of caffeine his profanity chafed her brain like sandpaper.
“There’s no need to be rude,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Let me try that again: please, bitch, order a fucking Grande. Is that better?”
The woman’s last frayed nerve snapped, and she turned around and slapped the man in the face.
Everyone heard it.
Everyone except the people sitting within a ten yard radius of five-month-old Ariella Kipling whose screams had managed to climb to a higher pitch than scientists had previously assumed possible. Her bickering parents were, however, unable to appreciate this miracle of physics taking place in their midst.
“You don’t know anything about children,” Paul Kipling said. “You’re so out of touch with your own body that you’re already giving our daughter an eating disorder.”
“She’s still breast feeding,” Nancy Kipling snarled. “I am her primary food source. She can’t have an eating disorder! She eats me!”
“Your negative body image is contaminating your breast milk like a carcinogen,” Paul snapped back. “That’s why she’s unhappy. She’d rather starve than keep drinking your hate milk!”
The toxic emotional spill gushing from the Kipling marriage was oozing over the passengers around them, whose defenses were already down thanks to Ariella’s aural attack. Their fight was a noxious cloud contaminating all of the relationships and marriages within earshot, causing conversations to curdle into arguments, tender gazes to harden into icy stares and cuddling to morph into stiff-armed rejection.
Over at the Carolina Sports Bar, customers felt their gorges rise as Carl Willers was seized anew by a series of wet, gloopy hacks so powerful that he rocked helplessly back and forth in his chair. Some of them stared at him murderously, while others pointedly picked up their trays of eggs and grits and moved to the counter.
The nondescript man sitting near Carl kept scratching away on his paper napkins, only dimly aware of Carl’s coughing. And far up in the pipes and girders, a heavy glass High Bay light fixture suddenly began to show alarming signs of metal fatigue in the clamps and screws that secured it.
The New Light Fellowship reached the end of “Eight Second Ride,” struck a pose and a few confused travelers gave them a spattering of desultory applause. But one middle-aged passenger, grossly overweight and deeply unhappy, threw a half-empty cup of Mountain Dew in their general direction and yelled, “Country music is for queers!” The New Light Fellowship believed in turning the other cheek, but everyone has a limit and insulting country music was theirs. They surrounded the heckler and began shoving him back and forth. They pinched his fat arms. They kicked his sagging butt. One of them spat in his face.
Over at Starbucks, the slapped man stood there for a moment, surprised that this frumpy spinster would dare lay hands on him, and then he shoved her hard, sending her backwards into a wicker basket packed with Ethos Water. She sprawled on the floor in an avalanche of plastic bottles and instantly she sprang back up and came at him, swinging her purse like a battleaxe.
At the Carolina Sports Bar, Carl Willers started up a new round of hacking, coughing so hard he thought he was going to throw up. Nearby, Ariella Kipling was screaming so loudly that several passengers began to weigh the pros and cons of actually killing her.
“When we get home I’m going to throw the TV right in the garbage and if you want to watch Real Housewives then you can go find some manorexic to move in with!” a red-faced Paul Kipling yelled at his wife.
“Are you calling me fat?” his wife screamed back.
And then, without a sound, the support screws holding the light fixture twenty-five feet above Ariella Kipling quietly snapped. The fixture weighed eighteen pounds, and it fell straight down at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared. It fell so fast and true that it looked like a missile fired right into Ariella’s Gracco Travel System and when it landed it made an enormous “Splortch!”
There was sudden, blessed silence. Paul and Nancy Kipling froze. They looked into the Gracco Travel System that now contained nothing but a High Bay Indoor lighting fixture and a large quantity of baby-flavored marmalade. There was