Nancy wasn’t allowed to use her earbuds when she rode in the car. Her parents both agreed, a minor and unfortunate miracle, that it was rude. Their decision was that she should be enjoying conversation with them instead of residing in her own little bubble of sound, cut off from the noises of the world. This would be a sensible rule if there was every any conversation to enjoy. Instead, the no earbuds rule simply subjected Nancy to the constant sound of her parents bickering.
Her family only had one car, and everyone commuted 40 minutes to and from the city every day for work and school. Thus was Nancy stuck with her arguing parents twice a day, for at least 80 minutes, unless of course traffic prolonged her agony. Today was a traffic day. She had already been listening to her parents bicker for 53 minutes and they weren’t even close to the front steps of school.
So far they had bickered about at least 20 different unique topics, including but not limited to dinner, laundry, dusting, the electric bill, two different sets of neighbors in two distinct arguments, summer vacation, and whether or not chickpeas and garbanzo beans were the same thing. None of these arguments had clear beginnings or ends, but vaguely bled one into the other as if powered by a perpetual disagreement machine.
Nancy was fed up, but she had no recourse. Her brain simply wasn’t adept at blocking things out, especially things that irritated her. What could she do outside of sticking her fingers in her ears and humming? This was a tactic she’d tried before but couldn’t sustain for any length of time. She could join in with the argument, but that normally only made things worse for her.
With the traffic at a standstill, she felt trapped, claustrophobic. The usual morning car ride was bad enough, but in her current situation she couldn’t even know when the end would come. How much longer would this go on? Had she died and gone to hell? Was this moment actually the eternity it felt like?
She tried to focus on her breathing, to relax and distract herself. It almost worked, but her mother’s barbed response to her father’s comment about the rain brought Nancy right back to her present circumstances.
Balling her fists and squeezing her eyes tightly shut Nancy wished has hard as she’d ever wished in her life that something, anything, would shut her parents up for just a moment. She wished and she wished, putting every ounce of mental energy she could muster into the foolish act.
Just when she thought her head might explode from how hard she was wishing Nancy heard her father mutter, “What the hell?”
It was right in the middle of one of her mother’s monologues to him about respect, and normally such an interruption by him in that moment would have resulted in an eruption of rage. However, this time her mother quickly trailed off.
Nancy opened her eyes, not sure why her parents had suddenly made her wish come true. She quickly found out. There before them, marching serenely down the median between directions of stopped traffic, was an impossible parade of purple moose. Each was purple, but in a variety of even less likely patterns and shadings: one striped like a zebra, another in argyle, yet another covered in purple gingham.
She couldn’t believe it. Had she really done this, just by wishing hard enough? Had she manifested something impossible creatures out of thin air?
Wherever the parade came from, it took her parents a full minute before they started arguing again. Sometimes you have to take what you can get.
trigger fiction. 