ateolf | "Acceptance"

For the first three weeks of summer, Juan Freidman went out to his car at 12:30 pm each day, greeted by the stagnant heat of oxygen trapped behind the windshield. He would scream and curse whatever god controlled the sun--circling the earth and laughing at him and these feeble structures of glass and metal sprawling across this vast wasteland, slowly burning it away more and more with each spin of the axis. Night never came fast enough. There was no escaping that horrible monster of the skies.
It was this third week that Juan stumbled upon the most ingenious scheme of his life. Walking the quarter mile to where his car sat in the parking lot, Juan noticed something special about a turquoise Ford Escort situated exactly 16.7249 feet from his path. Up against its windshield was a giant piece of cardboard with sunglasses printed across its white background. Of course! How did he not think of this before!? It was so obvious and simple! That night he stopped by a gas station on his way home and browsed the massive rack of car shades. He imagined each one spread beneath the stretch of glass covering the car's face, blocking the sun from its delicate interior. . . looking so fucking cool.
He picked out one particularly sleek pair and rushed outside to see how it looked. Sliding into the seat, brushing it up against the glass, stepping away. . . his jaw dropped. The sheer force of personality and style the car exhumed left him breathless. Was this machine really his? It was as if every childhood fantasy had come to life before his very eyes. Nobody could fuck with him. He thought he must know how Lou Reed feels. He got back in, threw the shades in the backseat, and drove home, almost afraid of this new sense of power seeping through every pore of his skin.
The next day, 12:30 came along and he returned to his car. There it sat, looking out at him past its glasses: cold and detached, masking its true intent. He stepped inside. Normally, he had to let the a/c run fifteen minutes before it got this cool! He pulled the shades down and kissed the backside of the cardboard in long, soft brushes. He folded it up and neatly placed it on the seat, pausing a moment to admire its beauty and compactness. He traced a finger over its sharp edges before turning the key and driving away.
It was the next week that a drastic change in Juan's daily activity occured. He could not take it any longer. Walking out to his car that day, he was overwhelmed by how utterly fucking cool it was. Fuckin' jetset! He jumped and down and screamed at the inferiority of every other car in the lot. "You fucking cocksuckers! This is my car! This is my fucking car!" He was barely able to keep his hand steady long enough to unlock the door. He immediately drove off; and this time, he left the shades in the windshield.
He drove, gliding his hands along the steering wheel as he went, screaming at the nothing he saw and the everything that was there. The car could see. It glared at every street corner it sped around. It mocked the world it knew it was better than from behind its guise of sunglasses. Juan could feel its pulse through each turn of the wheel. The car was driving him. He laughed. Why ruin something so goddamn beautiful in the first place!?
Lost amid waves of utter euphoria, he couldn't tell how long he had been driving before he turned into an alley and killed a twelve year-old boy. He stopped the car just a few feet from the brick wall and got out. The boy's corpse was yards behind him at the mouth of the alley, spread across the pavement with thin, red lines radiating outward. Juan picked up his head and sat with him in his lap, crying. But he soon realized that something had to be done. All the crying in the world couldn't put the little boy's brains back in his skull. Juan drug the fragile, little body to the car and placed it in the trunk. He drove out past the city limits, cardboard folded and securely positioned on the passenger seat.
He finally stopped at the construction site of some new warehouse. Only a few steel beams jutted from the ground, not yet providing the frame for this building. He carried the boy in his arms through the barren field breaking the span of the forest with its loose dirt and tread marks. A large ditch ran across the middle of the site. He gently dropped the body off the edge about six feet from freshly instealled drainage pipe spanning the walls of the ravine. He followed after. The body was already half-sunk into the mud and he continued to push soil down from the wall until it was fully covered.
Juan washed his suit when he got back home, but he could never get the bloodstain off his crotch. Still, he didn't change. He just sat there staring at it, waiting for the police to break down his door and carry him away, caged in the back of their car. He stayed that way for days, not once leaving his home. They never came. He had gotten away with it and slowly, this thought began to seep into his head. At first, he couldn't believe his luck, but it didn't take long before he understood the picture as a whole. No one could recognize the car with its shades on. It was the perfect disguise! Why, he could kill as many people as he wanted to and no one would know the better!
He spent three straight days organizing his list. Who did he hate the most? Who deserved to die?: finding these names, arranging them in a precise, hieratic order. As soon as he was without a doubt as to its infalibility, he returned to his car, hid the shades in the trunk, and drove to the gas station. He bought every different style of sunglasses they had. Absolute coverture was essential. Placing the hippest pair he had up on the dashboard, he headed back down the road, ready for his next victim.
It wasn't much later that the car crashed through the railing of a bridge and rolled down the embankment to the bottom of the ditch below. He crawled out of the wreckage through pillars of smoke and twisted metal and stood amid streams of oil bleeding from the car into the firm ground. Holding the mangled body of the car in his arms, he cried up to the heavens, "Why!? Oh, god, why!?" His best friend was dead and it was all his fault. Juan pulled the broken metal tightly against his bosom as his tears mingled with the shards of glass and radiator fluid circling his feet in the sparse grass and remained standing this way until the sun reached its destination, sinking beneath the horizon.