Never Drive A Car When You’re Dead

He couldn’t put it off any longer.

Esteban finally settled on the Lankershim exit of the northbound Hollywood Freeway.

Gliding down the ramp at 85 MPH. Such a serene and placid feeling. Orange, smog-filtered June moonlight stabbing through the tinted windshield.

He smiled. For the first time in months. It was all over now. All in the past. History. Mystery. Myth.

Esteban lifted his thick, sweaty hands from the steering wheel and lifted them above his head. Tom Waits was crooning on the car stereo.

— Waits has a voice like tires crunching on a gravel road, Esteban thought, one of those country lanes, surrounded by barren farm land, always with a mobile home in the distance. A dog out front, yapping his head off as you approach, snarling, exposing a row of ugly yellow fangs, the hideous unclean beast chained to a rusty railroad tie that had been pounded into the ground.

Esteban experienced a sudden lifting sensation, a fluttering in his stomach, as the chocolate-brown Volvo careened to the left with a squeal of rubber on asphalt, aerodynamics at play now, all systems go, tires crunching and mutilating the cold, crisp decorative iceplant garden of the offramp.

And then the rolling and rumbling, glass smashing and splintering, his skull ramming repeatedly into the imploding roof of the tumbling carrier of blackness; sharp edges, dagger-like, piercing the soft pink tissue of his brain.

But Esteban had been dead long before he opted for the Lankershim exit.