Inspired by Akap, A Music Video

Boot

The trick is to not breathe too deeply and to keep movements to a minimum. Leona knew this from the hundreds of times she’s ridden in the boot of her husband’s car over the years. Breathe through your mouth, keep quiet and do not cry. Easy as pie. Before you know it you’re at your destination, the door will pop open and he will help you out.

Leona is a psychology professor in a prestigious university in this part of the country. She is an accomplished artist; a few of her paintings have been peddled by Christie’s in New York. She knows that being made to ride in the boot of her husband’s car is wrong, yet she is powerless to say no every time he makes her do it. Actually, that is the wrong way to put it—for sometimes she volunteers to ride in the boot to appease her husband, especially when their arguments become too heated for comfort.

You could even say she is addicted to it. Over the years, through arguments and tears, riding in the boot developed into a ritual that now seemed to be a part of their married life.

Her husband is no redneck. He belongs to a long line of businessmen and runs the oldest business house in the country with his younger brother. He was educated in Harvard. They live in the toniest neighborhood in their country.

The ritual started shortly after they returned from the European honeymoon. He was livid after discovering she misplaced his love letters. He kept nagging her about their historical importance, since he comes from an old family and how people a hundred years hence will want to know how he courted his wife.

She retorted, “I don’t give a flying fuck. I live in the here and now, not 2100!”

He slapped her and forced her into the boot. She struggled then; struggled with everything she’s got, banged on the door and screamed as if there was no tomorrow.

To her dismay, there would be many more tomorrows, tomorrows spent in the boot for infractions as minor as taking off her engagement and wedding rings while scrubbing pots to going out with a fellow professor who happened to be lesbian and in love with her.

It was fortunate, Leona thought, that their union did not produce offspring who would surely be traumatized by the sight of her being imprisoned in such a small space, and increasingly with her consent.

“I used to have a spine,” she thought, way before she met her husband. Friends always marveled at her audacity. She could not count the number of times she came up to a stranger to chat with him because she found him attractive. She once streaked through her college campus on a dare. When she was much younger, she was a real tomboy and all her friends were boys. They’d moon teachers and are frequent occupants of the detention room. Now, she’s even afraid to break out of her routines, habits formed to cope with the stresses of her marriage. She learned to do the things her husband likes and discard the parts of her that she believes offends her husband. It was a slow process, the atrophy of her real self so that she barely noticed how far she left who she was behind. When she did, she thought sadly that it was too late to retrieve the pieces of herself that she’d let go.

This was their biggest row to date. He confronted her with pictures of her being affectionate with her lesbian co-professor. He had every right to be angry because she really was cheating on her husband. Their marriage, after four years, inevitably moved to the arctic regions of both their hearts. She could no longer feel the initial spark that attracted her to her very eligible husband back then. She sought to find a way out of her ennui, and she thought an affair, something forbidden, would breathe life back into their soulless marriage. She was wrong, she admitted, oh how very, very wrong!

She did not argue, she swallowed all the insults and epithets her husband threw at her. He had every right to be angry, she conceded. All that she asked of him was to let her go, break up the marriage because it was obviously making both of them miserable.

He was adamant, he threatened to hunt her down and bring her back if she ran away, and he could. To appease him, she popped the boot open and climbed in. He stared at her for a good minute, as if vacillating between getting her out and hitting her or closing the door and taking the long drive that always calmed him.

“Get out,” he commanded. He took off his tie and bound her hands, and then he stashed her into the front passenger seat of his silver blue Jaguar. He started the engine and drove eastward to where the mountains were. “Let’s end this.”

He drove up the mountain road, through hairpin bends until he reached the highest ravine. He stopped the car, pushed Leona out and hurtled into the deep abyss below.

Leona screamed for him to stop, trying to untie her hands.

It was too late. She loved him, loved him with all her heart. It was her who was moving away from him, who shut him out because she had trouble staying in an intimate relationship. It was her who had him twisted up in knots because he didn’t know how to engage her in their marriage. She knew that now.

But it was too late. Too late to change, too late to say the things she’d been longing to say to her husband, too late to undo her miscreant past.

Leona felt cold sitting on her knees on the side of the road. Maybe if she screamed his name he’d come back

“Simon!”

But all that was left was the singing of the crickets.