When You Buy a Green Car

When you buy a green car, you start seeing more green cars, and that’s a problem.

When you buy a green car, you start seeing more green cars. At night it’s hard to tell that they’re green but you can see them slide down the wrong side of the road. No one ever moves, but they never hit anyone. They never come towards you, but you catch them cutting through intersections, slipping along pavement like ice, their wheels moving out of time with their speed. Sometimes they do hit people, but you pretend you didn’t see that.

When you buy a green car, you start seeing more green cars. None of your friends or family see them, and they get rather uncomfortable when you grab them by the arm and drag them to a green car and burst into tears. They don’t like it when you keep asking how green the car is. They keep pleading with you to get help. They don’t talk to you as much because you keep bringing up green cars.

When you buy a green car, you start seeing more green cars. They’re alongside you in the underground parking ramp of your apartment complex and as you wake up you realize your engine is running and their engines are running and everyone else looks like they’re having a good nap too and you hit the horn and they all snap awake and drive away as quickly as they can.

When you buy a green car, you start seeing more green cars. You start seeing them in driveways, but never at the same house more than once. You sometimes see hands pressed against the windows from the insides of the houses, and you swear sometimes you hear crying from the insides of the houses, even as you speed up to get past. Sometimes you see ambulances at the houses later in the day.

When you buy a green car, you start seeing more green cars. You watch as they drive to Target as you drive to Target and when you get back in your green car when you’re done shopping you look in the trunk and at your receipt and try to remember why you bought so. many. knives. You wonder why you keep finding little shoes in the trunk of your green car, next to all the knives.

When you buy a green car, you start seeing more green cars. The drivers in other green cars never make eye contact. Some smile, but it’s that sort of smile you give when someone asks if you’re okay after you’ve seen a green car. Some frown, like they realize you’re in a green car. Some have a lot of teeth or not enough eyes or hands on the wheel at ten, twelve, and two. Some open their wide mouths like fish and you see little green pillbugs on their teeth, cleaning away the meals. Some push their fingers into their ears way too hard and giggle through your radio and you spin the dial to static but the static is synced with the giggling.

When you buy a green car, you start seeing more green cars. You go to national parks because maybe there are no green cars there and then you keep walking further and further into the woods. It’s dark but your green car has its headlights on and they make the dark forest green and you see other headlights from other green cars and other things like you that drive the green cars, but how can something like you keep falling end-over-end and screaming and cracking but still move forward like that?

When you buy a green car, you start seeing more green cars. Their green bumpers link them together like a chain of moldy sausages and they lead through the city and dark green clouds hang like pond scum in a sky of dirty green stars. You see green car after green car, and they whine and wince out of alleys as your fingers clutch the wheel harder, and start to turn green as the leather of the wheel is the skin of your hands. You see countless green cars, dripping down hills like the segments of a centipede, aerial antennas twitching and bending like scuttling legs. You watch from inside your green car as all the other green cars drive together towards the factory that makes green cars, and the doors to the factory are open wide and the green cars stumble in, resisting like prodded cattle.

When you buy a green car, you start seeing more green cars. You see them lifted up in the air on long, green arms and dropped into the mouth at the center of the factory and you hear the other things driving the green cars as they change and their flesh breaks the windows as it expands and tears on the jagged glass edges. The mouth in the factory opens and closes and inside of it is fire and burning green paint. Everything smells like burning green paint and burning green hair. You cry out with the other things driving the green cars and mean to be scared but you just feel happy and you try to reach forward to the mouth and crawl past the green cars in front of you but your wheels aren’t moving the way you want and your fingernails are coming off. Your voice is like a horn and a broken radio and you try to blink but your eyes are blinding circles that only look forward and you laugh and laugh with joy and pain because it’s almost your turn! It’s almost your turn!