In the back seat of a ’78 Ford Mustang a little boy was reading his first Dr. Seuss. He turned the page, expecting to continue the story, but was a little shocked and horrified to find it missing; he promptly gave up and returned the book to his father in the front.

The Mustang covered and digested miles of asphalt over the next few hours without a road incident. The car’s wheels had obscure marks on them, like scratches from a clawing zombie, or the signature cut-ups of a vandal. This extrapolation of personal violence into persistent travel, given its impetus by naturalistic car designers, was bingeing the product in the other direction.

The car followed the contours of the highway as faithfully as a dog arrowing toward its feeding bowl. Without slowing more than twice, there was no reason to avoid high-speed travel except to promulgate a seriously dystopian set of traffic rules, bound by nature, unforgiven by necessity.

The driver’s son stayed quiet in back, joyously coloring a comic book and putting his mark to paper for his father to see. The driver himself was a big man, tough in a working class way, with calloused hands resting lightly on a symbolically animalistic steering wheel. The glory of the trip was that it took them both through shantytowns on the edge of metropoles, where Wal-Mart behemoth buildings held scores of shoppers who pushed their cars like zombies heading for the apocalypse.

A transport truck pulled up beside the speeding Mustang — large and powerful, it radiated hostility to the other vehicles on the road. Easily, casually, the father of the boy turned his car into the far left lane to escape the slipstream of the commercial driver. The driver of the transport truck noticed this, corrected the direction he was taking, and slalomed left in pursuit, mostly for the thrill of hounding the innocent.

With the overhaul of the province’s traffic laws and with the increasingly relevant societal obliteration, it was imperative that the smaller vehicle be given its space. Time out for children; time out for truck drivers too. As far as the eye could see, the other vehicles were getting the hell away from the big truck. A mass exodus was taking place on the highway whereby all the drivers signaled to each other that this was the moment to strike and moved accordingly.

The Mustang not only risked death and dismemberment to its human riders, but also violated the environment by sending out mass quantities of toxic gases which floated to the stratosphere unimpaired. Fortunately (or not?) the transport truck driver turned off the highway for some rest time at the local truck stop — sheltered under an aluminum canopy 100 feet long and 40 feet wide, made by local craftsmen (from Japan).

In response to the signals being sent from the other cars, the Mustang drive honked his horn twice in solidarity and was given a blowback from dozens of angry drivers pissed off by the lack of discretion inherent in the Mustang driver’s brain.

After the Mustang swerved off the beaten path to grab some Mickey D’s, the little boy went to the washroom and peed in concetration, getting pee on his hands. He washed himself off, then returned to his father in the restaurant where the old man was berating a Trump supporter for wearing his MAGA red hat. The Republican fan was angry, distracted, and running his hand through his hair. This display of shaken nerves was as vicariously satisfying for the Mustang father as a peek at a naked woman’s masturbatory habits.

When the man and the boy abandoned the restaurant, the father put his hand on his son’s shoulder and smiled at him wordlessly. It was true love that guided them then; it was true love that does so now. The end of the road was not the end of the story; it was only the beginning.