This one is more of flash fiction but as I'm new here I figured I'd post something extra short that way it would actually be read. Enjoy!

ROAD FEAR



It began at nine p.m. The low, whining hum from somewhere in the cabin of my vehichle. 2000 Toyota Tacoma with chipped and fading red paint. Sun damage and bird feces on a living machine I washed and cleaned like a pet. But as if it were a woman, I entered and I controlled the dance, I both drove to climax and finished with phallic objects: A blinker and gear shift. But women should not be controlled and I know little about vehicles. Regardless of my pretensions, I became the vehicle, driving at eighty miles an hour, ten miles over the speed limit is just fine dad says, towards a destination where my life would resume. For then there was this, something normally usual for me, albeit stressful as anything, and something was different that time.

The whining Hum I tagged on air-conditioning problems. That was easy. Four hours ago someone's tire exploded, the rubbery skin bouncing up and hitting the grill of my vehicle. Two hours ago I had to swerve to the shoulder to avoid hitting another- one who had stopped abruptly and left me cursing an hour afterward. It had been an eventful day. I had four hours to go before I reached my destination.

The car behind me was very close, so close. Its front bumper to my metal backside, attempting motorist rape. I said something then, can't remember what but it was something threatening to the stranger behind me. Words hit the glass and metal and died without a gravestone. I assumed there was someone in that large machine. My Tacoma was small for a truck, that was a Dodge something, I don't know, but it would have made my truck bleed, it was too big. Why didn't the guy or girl just pass me? I guessed guy because big trucks, trucks in general, are normally drove by guys. This the culture we live in. But what is culture? What I saw behind me was a window showing nothing and everything. A window opening up into forever. I had no idea. Whoever it was had tinted windows and it was as dark as the end of days outside. No moon, no stars, and obscured wilderness around the concrete interstate that whirled by in otherworldliness. Something that really got me was how those lights shone from the mammoth truck, piercing into my own cabin. These were bright but they were the wrong color, some kind of pale silverish hue that made me so uneasy I wondered if I ate something rotten earlier.

When the Truck finally moved into the fast lane beside me and accelerated, I said it's about time louder than under my breath and looked to my side. For some reason I liked to see the faces that controlled these wonderful death bringing devices, especially those ones who had gotten under my skin. As the Truck matched speed with me and paralleled my own vehicle, a cabin light switched on.

My head and chest were filled with extreme lightness, beating heart fanatical and furious, unbelieving thoughts. This can't be right.

The face of the driver turned towards me as if to say get a good long look, this is right. The face, to put it simply, was a mutilated mess of blood, flesh, and brains. The right half of the skull was pushed up and smashed and splintered, blood and a red gooey matter I guessed to be brains clinging sporadically at places like pie or candy on a messy child's mouth. The eye on this most damaged side actually dangled from the socket by fleshy gushing red wiring. The other one was intact but that was almost worse, it looked at me defiantly, living, sparkling with penetrating, violating triumph; the triumph that I could see and be tortured. Its eyes and mine. Below these interrupted, choppy seas of filth infected water, the nose was severed and hanging by flesh, like the dangling eye. Lips didn't move but they smiled in a sort of way, lips that were smashed and crooked and caked with blood. Right before the light switch was flicked off by the hand of the motorist, I realized what I was I meant to understand: if it weren't for all of the mutilation on that person, I would have been looking into a mirror. The man had looked exactly like me.

For some reason, it made me think of that time I had seen a gravestone sitting uprooted on the side of a road as I drove from my Uncle's house. I couldn't be sure, but I had thought that I glimpsed my name on that stone.

- Victor Eric Sweetser