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​​"The woman's flabby armwings were hanging from her yellow viscose t-shirt over the plastic tray in front of her, the fat from her hips oozing from the window seat to Maggie's middle one. Maggie, who was seventeen and skinny, felt invaded and sympathized with why airlines contemplated making such passengers pay for two seats.
"My son was doing cocaine and crystal meth ", the woman said, " but now he's on the straight and narrow ". Maggie imagined a bow and arrow, creamy yellow and burgundy - she'd liked the colours - that she'd found in the attic as a child and played with on a hill, learning how to focus singlemindedly. She was tired of being a passive listener - the woman talked only about herself ( she'd been to Toronto to visit her son, now on parole ) and tried to give signs of not only wanting but needing to return to her laptop, staring at and touching it repeatedly, the relationship between her fingertips and the smooth silvery metal sensual. She was used to the enormity of choice that was a part of her generation's twenty-first century environment, the unprecedented plethora - the different ways in which coffee could be ordered at Starbucks, for instance, the never ending list of television ...

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