Of Hours at the Wheel.... (23:15)

The radio kicks on, begins playing a song chosen at random amidst two thousand other possibilities, and gives the interior of his car a feeling of immutable charisma, an environment imminently sustained by his ironic silence...

"If the presentation speaks for itself, it speaks enough for both of us," he thinks absently.

He checks the road behind him and catches a glimpse of his own tired eyes in the rear-view mirror... they don't even look like his: patches of Distance, Aloofness, Coldness, and perhaps even a shade of Antagonism - they remind him of the looks he'd get from guard dogs as a kid when he would pass by just out of their range, a worthless target, but one that's fun to intimidate anyway...

As he drives on, the street lights glide over the thin corneal layer of each eye, reflected with an aqueous sheen into a sapphire-blue streak of momentary brilliance... unblinkingly driven forward, an insouciance between beams connected by threads of a celestial silk worm, effortless in their design; breaking conscious thought into a glittering web of light, just before the next passing bolt of electric azure...

The world exists as a pastiche, a parody of itself; these people living in it blithely enhancing the already comical display: awkwardness, forced amiability, a pretense rivaled only by the belief that it's genuine...

"And I'm supposed to talk to them?"

Jaded at age 19... just watch them turn up their noses like that... but this isn't jade, this is obsidian, volcanic glass, sharp enough to sever flesh and nerve, and with a reflective hide polished enough to show you your face as it happens... what happened in their lives to make them treat other people that way? What happened in the lives of their suitors to make them find that trait acceptable... even desirable? With each successive generation, the farce that is their superiority continues its profligate expansion into the norm, making the decency of the remnant few ever the exception...

The car crawls by this surfeit adolescence, barely making a sound and ignoring all attempts made to flag it down... he can't help but stare at their faces... desperate for the confirmation of privy counsel with the person who's going to take them on a jaunt to the ubiquitous - the experience of a lifetime that's to be had pretty much anywhere with a door. But not tonight. Tonight is his night to taunt them, prospecting a future to be had if only they had waited a little longer to so proudly display their... defining qualities... which are all he needs to validate his disappearance; a saccade from here to nowhere, matching his eyes as they flick back to the road, flashing in the lights once again as a resilient, auditory blue...

And thus, the children are left crestfallen in a current of traffic, their disappointment ringing with the sound of dying cells yet blissfully ignorant of it, concerned with one thing, and one thing only...

"Me."