A Spirited Defense of Hating Kids on Leashes

This week’s prompt is #collaboration, which pairs up two writers for one piece. This is one part of a two-part series, written by Kelaine Conochan and Zach Straus.

I saw a woman step on a child’s leash, once.

I was in the Cincinnati Airport. I am eternally thankful.

I was waiting for a flight back to DCA, which, because airplanes, was late. The kid was probably 6, probably named Tyler, and probably on a leash because he was a freakin’ asshole.

Problem was, the leash wasn’t helping. One could even argue that it made this kid even more of an asshole. Basic laws of physics and nature. Pressure increases inside a container as the gas heats or the space constricts. A badger is harder to fight in a hole. Nobody puts baby in a corner.

Did you ever make compass art in elementary school? Concentric, looping lines radiating from a central point, smashed tightly next to one another, forcing you to squint to discern where one arc stops and starts? The whole effect looked kind of like that.

The terrible little white kid, sprinting in loops and ovals around his disinterested, dead-eyed, cargo-panted father, who could only be bothered to pass the leash from hand to hand to accommodate the rotation, turning the pair into a two-person nunchaku, a helicopter rotor of inconvenience and noise.

Over the course of 20 minutes, the Probably Tyler cleared out a circle with a 15-foot radius.

At a crowded gate, 6 inches are your birthright, and 2 feet can feel like a luxury. Claiming 15squared feet was an Antoinettish act of selfishness and lack of awareness.

I was trapped in a corner with a dough-white, Disney-shirted family of five, a not-unhandsome businessman inevitably named Brad, two South Korean college girls, and a teenage boy glued to Snapchat, ignoring texts from his parents who were staring expectantly at him from the other side of the kid-copter’s death circle.

I wouldn’t go as far as to call us a refugee settlement, but a lot of the rules were the same. Unique forms of commerce. Forced intimacy. Limited resources. More young people than old. Everyone wanting to be somewhere else.

Time wore on, and Probably Tyler only seemed to get stronger.

Whenever someone attempted to cross into his territory, he’d run at them, screaming. He kicked luggage, kicked his father, kicked a bottle of soda, even kicked his own backpack into the shins of an elderly woman, sitting in one of the few chairs available. Repeatedly.

There were other, slightly more cohesive encampments like ours perched on the edges of the waiting area. People driven to the fringes of society by this monster. A high school girls’ soccer team. A church group. A Hispanic family of four. The mother of which, the hero of this story.

There was no defining moment, no specific act, no tangible, tastable transgression that led to the mother rising to all of our aid. I think she just reached her boiling point.

She calmly stood up, watched as Probably Tyler ran in circuits, listening to the dopplered rise and fall of his constant, low-grade squeals, timing him, understanding his horrible rhythm. On his fourth pass, she stepped out into his area, one foot planted, the other momentarily raised in the air, waiting as his leash snaked by before coming down with force on the trailing end.

Probably Tyler’s legs kept running, but his body stayed in place. Like the floor was suddenly ice. Like he was a lumberjack doing a log roll. Like Bambi on goddamn ice.

He didn’t fall violently, but it definitely wasn’t pretty.

Want to check out Kelaine’s take? Read on, you extraordinarily beautiful, highly literate creature.