Here's a new short story I just wrote the other day. If you're paying attention to this page, please let me know what you think of it in the comment section. Peace!
Traffic
John hated his job. Everything about it was spiritually oppressive and because of this, his arrival home each night brought to mind thoughts of a massive weight being lifted off of his shoulders. Lately though, he had continued to be on edge long after arriving home and it was starting to bother him. He kept thinking about that traffic that stole still more of his time away from him as he sat in it after having 8 hours thieved from him every Monday through Friday. John thought about the cruelty of a society that, all ethical and moral advances aside, continued to rape its members of two-thirds of the time of most of their days through 8 hour workdays and 8 hour sleep recommendations. He’d been making a point of staying up as late as possible each night to reduce the degree to which this societal time-plundering affected him.
The doctors told John that should he stop taking his medication, it might result in instability that could turn violent. When on his medication however, John often felt lethargic and drowsy, which made being at work that much more unbearable. Recently, in addition to ceasing his “medicinal” regiment, he’d been sleeping even less than usual. Despite the fatigue that inevitably plagued him at work, the adrenaline rush of walking through those doors at the end of the day after flipping his boss’s door and the time clock off seemed to be keeping his gears clicking on all cylinders outside of work.
On the route he took home from work, they had recently closed the far-right of four lanes at an exit roughly 2 to 3 miles from where he entered the freeway, slowing rush hour traffic to a stop-and-go charade of frustration and even panic depending on how poorly the work day had closed. John could not for the life of him understand why all these thousands of people who took the same route home every day just as he did could not figure out that if they all treated the situation as a three-lane highway instead of a four-lane until the construction, they could all drive at a reasonable pace and thus reduce the evening commute time drastically. Every day he would merge into one of the 2 far left lanes immediately to avoid the melee of merging automobiles to his right vainly trying to advance themselves toward suburban destinations, and every day the jerks around him would continue using the rightmost lane to fly up as far as they could before the lane closed and cut people in the 3 left lanes off, further slowing down traffic.
One Friday night after having been reamed out by his boss for another co-worker’s mistake, John left the office with a feeling of absolute dread in his stomach. Nothing had been going right for him of late, and his lack of sleep was starting to take its toll on his mind. The last thing he wanted to do was navigate through the sea of painfully slow cattle that awaited him on the Shoreway. Incredibly, he was able to make it through the construction zone in no time, a feat he presumed was made possible by other “slackers” like himself leaving their paid prisons early to get a head start on the weekend, which came and went in less than a blink of John’s sleep deprived eyes.
The following Wednesday, John was stuck in stop-and-go traffic in the middlemost of the three open lanes on the Shoreway. He found himself behind a space cadet in an overpriced, undersized, environmentally soul-sucking SUV who had slammed on his brakes with no one in front of him just before the freeway entrance to let a semi-truck turn out of a driveway. Infuriated, John screamed out the window, “Oh come on!,” an exclamation he was sure the driver in front of him had heard. Sitting in line, traffic began to pick up once again, and he thought that he was about to spring free and be able to drive at a decent pace. Then, the driver in front of him misjudging the actual speed of the flow of traffic, slammed on his brakes again forcing John to do the same once again.
Stopping short of the car in front of him, John felt an unfamiliar pressure in his temples that seemed to intensify-and-burst, intensify-and-burst numerous times in a matter of seconds. Before he knew it, he had jerked the steering wheel to the right while slamming on the accelerator. He sideswiped the front of a car to his right gunning his engine for the guard wall at the right hand side of the road. John felt himself screaming angrily at the top of his lungs as he slammed into the guard wall. Taking a second to recover from the shock of the collision, he reached in the center console of his compact car and grabbed the Swiss Army knife his father had given to him years ago that he kept in the car for emergencies and protective purposes. Stepping outside of the car and onto the concrete of the highway’s berm, he screamed a nonsensical barrage of curses into the amorphous blotch of automobiles lazily idling away from the scene of his wreck, and then took one good rip across his throat with the knife. As blood spilled from the severed veins in his neck, he calmly stumbled to the other side of the car and lay down on the scorching ground. As the heat from the pavement surrounded his fading body, he thought to himself “never again will this traffic steal from me; never again will it hold down my soul”.
