Channeling Vonnegut

I pulled into the parking lot and got out of my car, unconsciously checking my pockets for smokes. I produced a smoke and a match and lit up, watching the eddies in the fog as cars drove by in the too heavy damp air.

I scuffed my shoes on the blacktop, kicking at nothing and hearing the wet scuffing of my shoes as the off color light of the fluorescents towering over head in the parking lot turned the fog into a cloud of urine. Then I noticed the head of a frog sticking out through the top of the blacktop near where I had parked my beat up car.

It looked frozen there...

It was frozen there. It was dead. I pressed my foot on its head, covered in layers of blacktop sealant and it did not squish like I wanted it to. It was hard. Calcified in a layer of black pitch like a warden of the lot, ever watching. He was looking through me and at me. His glazed eyes searched for delicious small green flies behind my eye sockets. He almost found them.

I looked at him. I thought about construction workers, too lazy and overworked on the bullshit of preparing convenience store parking lots to give a damn about even one frog, stuck there in the blacktop, let alone the thousands of other frogs that may be buried there, without their heads sticking out. I thought about the future where me and all my friends and relatives looked up blankly into the sky covered in blacktop sealant, our open mouths and eyes staring up through the mockery of urine tinted fog.

I wanted to cry with the morbidity of it, but couldn't bring myself to give a shit. All I carried with me for the rest of the evening, apart from the pungent smell of cigarette smoke, and the urine fog clinging to me like a dark hollowing blanket, was the sense of dread that felt just as damp as the fog. The dread that I would become the warden of the lot, searching for hamburgers behind some other bastards overly curious seeking eyes.

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