Flash Fiction – Bad Bag
Bad Bag by Luke W. McCullough
It all really went when I asked the young woman to do something about her luggage because it was urinating on my foot. It has been hot all summer and as my own little protest against Mother Nature’s temperature choice I have not worn socks since Memorial Day. But, my choice of footware, grey canvas top-siders bought on special at Costco, was not really why I mentioned the bad behavior of the bag to the young woman.
It was not an imposing bag, an oversized rollaboard type, the kind people always try to stuff in overhead bins and only fit half the time. Even though, bag had been making people uncomfortable since Central. In fact, other than when it had tossed a dude-bro in a suit out the door at Harvard for talking on the phone way too loud, the bag had been very inappropriate. It had taken up two seats, in the reserved for old people section nonetheless, until the woman on the other side of it had harrumphed loud enough when an uncomfortably pregnant lady had got on. That is when the bag got pissy. Well, it got pissy when it actually pissed on my shoe, when it had to get up it just got bitchy.
The bag made a big show of getting up, and then having to find something to hold onto. It took up more space then it needed, opened its Metro Paper wide hitting people around it, stepped on peoples’ feet, wouldn’t move in to make more room, and when it did have to move it made a big show with lots of loud wheezing and jangling of zippers.
Through out all of this the young woman who was clearly traveling with the luggage, I had seen them get on together and take a selfie together before sitting down, tried to ignore it. She made herself smaller, and pretended to be really into the book she was failing to read.
All I really wanted to do was get on the train, read a few pages of my book, maybe read a few tweets, and instead I have to be THAT person. Confronting the obnoxious rider, but the luggage had crossed the line.
Now, I understand that the T is crowded, not ‘Tokyo rush hour crowded’ with little men with white gloves pushing on people so the doors can close crowded, but crowded enough that I don’t worry about sudden stops because there is no way anyone could fall over we are packed in so tight crowded, and you lose all rights to personal space at some point. But, the luggage grabbed that woman’s ass at Kendall. It was not an accident as it tried to play it off. I saw the whole thing from where I was standing. It so reached out and tweaked the woman’s ass. The woman was in a hurry and so surprised, that other than a slight meep of a sound she didn’t even react.
I did.
“What the fuck?” I said to the luggage.
It just turned away trying to ignore me.
“No, really, the fuck was that?” I said, moving closer to the luggage. The train had cleared out a bit at Kendall and MGH, so I could get right up in the luggage’s zippers. “You grabbed that woman as she got off. What the hell? That is way not cool.”
This is when the luggage turned one of its wheels and took a leak on my foot.
“Really? Really? Hey, miss do you see what your luggage is doing?”
We had passed Park and my stop was next. I was pissed, had a wet foot and said, “You really need to do something about your luggage, I cannot believe you take it on the train if it behaves like this.”
I got off and as the doors started to close I could hear her faintly say to no one in particular, “It is really not like this normally, it only gets like this when it drinks.”
Yeah, right, fucking luggage.
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