That baby on the plane had to die.

I do not mean this for real, of course. I am a civilized person and law abiding, more or less. If nothing else, I am fully aware that polite society frowns on the killing of infants. It does not matter if you festoon the murder with pageantry by shouting “mazel tov!” after stomping on the baby’s head. It does not even matter if the baby is annoying enough to have it coming.

To be fair, most babies are not that bad. They spend most of the time passed out and drooling on themselves. Heck, I do that after several drinks. If they start making a lot of noise, it is easy enough to put some distance between yourself and the loud baby, provided it is not your kid. If it is yours, you may have to take inspiration from the mother in the song “Rockin’ in the Free World.” I won’t judge.

For the baby in my proximity, relocation was not an option. It was a full flight and I would have been hard pressed to find someone willing to swap places so they could hear an infant wail like a banshee. Make no mistake. That baby was loud and it was not just during the descent when there was pressure on the ears and it was too stupid to yawn. It spent the entire flight screaming and carrying on, encouraged by a mother convinced that every sound it made was a blessing for us all.

At this point, a coarser fellow than myself might have turned around and said, “Listen, bitch. Either you silence that little fucker or I will personally end its life. And rest assured it will not die a virgin.”

Of course, I did no such thing, As I said before, I am civilized. I prefer to use my baser instincts to create a story rather than commit atrocities. The baby still had to die, but only in the world of make-believe. The problem was that when it came to storytelling, I was not at my best. The birthday weekend in Portland had pushed me to design limit and I was unable to come up with any original ideas.

If Becca were sitting next to me, this would not be an issue. All I would have to do is mouth the words “kill it” and she would reply with a smile and a nod. We are soulmates, after all. Alas, the days of seat selection without paying a hefty fee are long gone and she was 12 rows ahead of me where the baby noises were drowned out by the sound of the jet engines. Since both our phones were in airplane mode, I could not vent via a messenger app and had to suffer in silence.

So originality be damned. Plagiarizing only myself, I attempted to retool part of a story from Hot Flashes. The sudden-decompression-on-a-plane bit would work, but this story had to be a teachable moment for an indulgent mother. That’s where my protagonist came along. Sitting next to the mother, he would put her maternal devotion to the test during a moment of crisis.

That moment came when a window blew out in the row where they were seated. Like most mothers, she was not keen on having her infant sucked out of plane so she hung onto it amidst the sound of rushing air and other passengers freaking out. One passenger remained calm, the one sitting next to her. He had his finger deep in his nostril and was digging around for one of those huge boogers one cultivates during air travel. Striking pay dirt, he hauled it out and it clung to his extended finger. It was disgusting. It was supposed to be. He slowly moved his finger closer to the back of the mother’s hand that was holding her child by the leg. When the nose nugget was half an inch away, she let go and recoiled her hand in revulsion.

The passenger count on the flight went down by one and the mother learned that the love she had for her infant was not boundless.

So where did the story go from there? Did the woman simply thank the man for a valuable life lesson or did they go fuck in the lavatory? I never got that far. I had been typing the plot outline into the Notes app on my phone when I realized that the guy sitting next to me could have easily read every word. I put my phone away and sat with my hands folded in my lap.

The baby continued to scream as we made our final descent into SFO.