Perhaps the food on the floor or that the child was not strapped in should have warned me she wasn’t just being polite. In any event, I was a captive audience for this flight of terror for the next two hours. Two very long hours.

It began simply with some good old fashion whacking. Why do children randomly slam objects around? I don’t know, but within five minutes I looked like I just walked out of a boxing ring with Mike Tyson (before prison). But that was ok, in comparison to the shrieking.

The child was obviously possessed. By what, I don’t know, but that must have been what caused the shrieking. At first I was irritated. Then I was in awe of how long, how loud and how painful the noise was. At no point during the flight did the mother reach over and kill the child. Why, I still don’t know.

Eventually the shrieking hit a certain frequency and caused my kidneys to resonate and explode. All of this was very tiring. It also seems that if one child is screaming, the rest decide it is ok for them to scream too. This was painful logic.

The plane had about 200 seats (like I know), which easily held 5364 screaming children. I felt like I was in a cave of giant bats or something. To note, I could tell that two of the screaming children behind me were together as they were experiencing ‘alter-beating’. The tell-tale symptom of alter-beating is that one child is in ‘full scream’ mode while he other is only whimpering. Then they switch. This is because the PICOB (Parent In Charge Of Beating) is alternating the swings – thus, ‘alter-beating’.

What’s more annoying about this situation? How tired I was. I actually slept through quite a bit of this journey. At this point my arm and ass had gone numb. I had developed tenitis (ringing in the ears) and I was in the fetal position in my seat trying to sleep – thus my lower back was also broken in several places. So could it get any worse? I actually can’t say because I no longer had a brain.

That’s because the child beside me blew it out of my head. Literally. The shrieking was so bad it was as if it had pressed its lips against my ear, breathed deeply, and then shrieked until my brain shot out the other ear and onto the window. Now I have a headache.