GO BOOM
So much steel. So many cars. So many lanes in so many roads waiting for so many more. So much empty land waiting to be converted into so many parkinglots or so many roads.
This is what all the cars look like when they are ended, one by one.
1. A car explodes from within, holding the explosion in like somebody holding her breath to stop a hiccup too powerful for that. Its headlights jump out like eyes bugging out and dust flies from every seam. The windshield and all the windows crack into little pieces of glass the size of pebbles with only two sides.
2. A red Oldsmobile blows up completely. When all the smoke has cleared it looks like nothing was ever there except for an empty road.
3. A brand new car flips while parked and lands on its top, crushing it down flat.
4. A small non-American made fourdoor shivers like a freezing child and shivers itself into many many small pieces.
5. What make of car is this? Who knows? What happens to it is that all four wheels shoot straight out from their axles - they shoot out fast, bullets big as tires, and the rest of the car clunks down and cracks in half.
6. The next car turns every color you could imagine when it explodes - for a while it is a fountain of light. While it explodes it hisses like a snake and keeps hissing after it is gone.
7. A long black limousine coughs and breaks into three small black cars which all have problems going in the direction they should and end up crashing into each other. They burn forever and the long black color of the former limousine ascends the sky as a long black cloud of bitter smoke.
8. With the proper music driving beside it, this car does a striptease on its own, dropping its metal sides off seductively and peeling off all its other parts until all that's left is the brown carpeting that used to be for passenger's feet lying lonely on some highway.
9. A white Chrysler jumps up and down like a kid bouncing on a bed. It cracks the road and the earth with its bouncing and crushes its way, bouncing, down into the deep fiery core of the earth, where it explodes and dies.
10. This small orange car hit the entry ramp too fast and shoots itself far up into the sky. When it reaches the upper atmosphere it fizzles like a firefly and dissolves completely under pressure and flame.
11. This car is too loud for its own good. The sky itself presses down and makes it as flat as a crepe.
12. A brown Honda Civic turns immediately into a single puff of smoke, grey and heavy, that lays down as a layer of dust on the highway.
13. Like it or not, an entire used carlot full of cars lifts up off the ground - the blacktop does, taking all the cars upon it with it. When it has reached a good height it suddenly flips upsidedown and crashes back to earth, pounding all the cars on it into the ground.
14. A tan Audi, nearing a good speed, caves in on itself, leaving nothing.
15. All the cars in the mall parkinglot suddenly come unstuck, their parking brakes released, and roll all the way to the end of the world, whereupon they all roll off.
16. A black Thunderbird catches fire, and burns with an eternal flame.
17. Each parking meter along the block suddenly jumps out of the sidewalk and bashes the car parked beside it into pieces as if it were a sledgehammer wielded by an invisible giant.
18. All the weeds that Jackson Meatball could never take care of squeeze out of the cracks in the asphalt around this car and surround it, grabbing it all over and taking it with them, in one piece, thru the cracks.
19. A semi truck rolls over and over like a paper tube and squashes twenty cars before it rolls itself into oblivion.
20. Two identical cars crash head-on. Instead of smoke and fire, their crash produces bubbles, which turn out to be just as deadly.
21. A man strikes a match on the side of his car and, instead of the match lighting, his car does, and burns down quickly to a black heap as his cigarette waits on his lip without a flame to ignite it.
22. Five cars get lost in a thick fog and are never seen or heard from ever again.
23. Boom! Krsh! Sh! Shwoomb!
24. The rain creeps into a blue corvette. Overnight it rusts completely. In the morning, when its owner gets in and slams the door shut, it crumbles all around him.
25. A family car with a family inside pops like a child's balloon and the skin of it catches and lingers on a tree branch.
26. The loud music pouring out of this car's car stereo speakers stops being music and becomes the car itself blaring out until the car is nothing but more noise rising above the sound of a busy intersection.
27. One more car, for no special or apparent reason at all, explodes suddenly and lights up the horizon from one end to the other.
28. The moon in the sky, jealous of that last car's explosion and bright display, far brighter than its own, bounces like a superball down to earth and smashes a freeway interchange bridge, sending all the cars that would have passed over it to their fiery doom as the moon itself nonchalantly bounces back to its regular place in the sky.
29. When this car explodes, a flag that says "BOOM" springs out of the top and the car falls to little pieces.
30. A datsun receives a radio signal that's too powerful for its radio and the whole car cooks like someone exterminated on the electric chair.
31. A cement mixer crashes into a Plymouth Fury and encases it in concrete while the mixer itself stalls at a railroad crossing and is decimated by a speeding diesel locomotive.
32. All the cars come out of the factory, shining on the assemblyline, and fall into a mass grave.
33. This car makes so much smog that it kills anyone who tries to drive it. It ends up old and lonely locked up in a garage somewhere until a meteorite falls on the garage and makes a huge crater, which fills with water and becomes a lake in the springtime.
34. Without any explanation, a Bronco turns into a planter in which no plants may grow.
35. A whole wall of a building comes detached just to cream all the cars parked along the street beside it.
36. You can hear and feel the explosion, loudness, a rocking, but you can't see what happened. Certainly, somewhere another car blew up.
37. A blue stationwagon rolls down a hill much too fast. Its back end flips over its front end and its rubble at the bottom of the hill ignites and burns brightly.
38. The smallest piece of metal on a convoy truck trailer, rolling down the highway and full of shiny new cars on their way to the showroom, buckles and becomes, for a moment, something like a spring. The entire metal structure erupts and all the cars attached to it pop into the air as if they were shot from catapults. They all fly in different directions; some fly further than others. When they hit the ground they each explode. Some take other cars driving on the road with them. The truck cab keeps driving down the highway until it crashes into a motorcycle and they both blow up.
39. A car is parked next to a rich weeping boulevard tree. The boulevard tree explodes, taking the car with it.
40. An army of rats attacks a silver Rolls Royce and takes it apart, piece by piece. All the rats scurry away, taking pieces of the Rolls with them.
41. The first car spills some gasoline. The second car makes sparks that ignite it. The third car smashes them all together. All three explode at once.
42. The detour sign is a trick. All the cars drive straight off a steep cliff and crash on the plateau below.
43. The driver parks the car and leaves the lights on. The lights make the car overheat and it soon explodes.
44. A mechanic made a big mistake and the car he operated on only minutes ago goes out of control and swerves into a full schoolbus. Many tears are shed.
45. The front and back ends of a comfortable mid-seventies sedan fly off in either direction but come back like boomerangs, smashing the middle of the car and sending the whole thing into tall flames.
46. The burning begins as a sensation on someone's skin, something that just suggests the pain of what is really going on, but before long it gets out of hand. Every gasoline tank it looks at screams in pain then punches outward. The explosions shake even the coldest, most remote stars.
47. A young boy's whole collection of toy cars suddenly starts on fire. He tries to blow out all the little fires on his cars as if he were trying to blow out all the fires on a birthday cake, but he can't do it.
48. A movie star riding in her limousine explodes. The explosion in her turns her limo into a big pink carnation in the middle of the highway.
Copyright 2002 John Akre
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