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| Illustration by Na Kim |
FLASH FICION
The Weight
by Anne Enright
29 August 2019
When she checked her boarding pass, she was in the middle of the row, and there was a man in a blue suit on the aisle, who gave her a big bleached-white smile as he stood to let her past. The window seat stayed unoccupied for a while, and her hopes rose when a man with a clipboard boarded the plane, his hair gauzy with dew. But there were still people in the aisle, and one of them now stopped beside her row: a huge boy, who was trying to make space for a rucksack in the overhead bin. His belly was right there—she could see it as his green shirt parted company with the belt of his jeans. The rucksack did not fit, so he clasped it to his chest as he turned sideways to squeeze past her and into the window seat. He was wearing a Peruvian hat in brown-and-white wool with a design of llamas and a flap over each ear, and there were tassels dangling from the flaps down to his collar line. A teen-ager. Ninety per cent muscle, thirty per cent puppy fat; he might have another few inches still to go. Once he was seated—she did not know how he did it, but the bag was wedged between his legs and eased under the seat in front, and somehow this huge child made himself small for her. Tucked away. Almost decorous. The guy on the aisle had a newspaper, a big broadsheet, which he opened with a shake, but the child by the window gave her room. He did not smell, not even his hat. His eyes, when she checked, were shy and brown.
