“My goal,” I said, steering the car into on-coming traffic and really leaning down on the accelerator, “is to be the prettiest, cruelest man you’ve ever loved.”

The scream of metal and innocent lives being cut short, by metal. The car is an angry beast that lives on blood and bad dreams. The car is parting the road like Moses leading his people across the sea - it’s leading me across a red sea of bits of peoples. Blood bits of people, strewn about the front of the car.

“I want to hold your hand at movies. I want to be your boyfriend. I want you to cry at the thought of me dying. But I don’t want you to like me. I want you to be sort of indifferent to my presence, especially when we’re making love.”

The car jumps curbs and crushes children, big wide tires splitting open the little bodies of babies and dwarves. The car is out of my control, just killing and killing and killing. Automobiles pile up in burning heaps and humans spill out the windows like broken eggs.

“We’re gonna have fun,” I say to her, like it’s a threat. “We’re gonna fall deeply in love, and be something like happy,” and that part is a threat. One hand on the wheel, the other moving slowly up her thigh. 

She smiles, like maybe we really are in love.
She smiles, and reaches for the door.
She smiles, and kicks herself out to the road, at a few hundred miles an hour.
She’s practically gone before she even hits the pavement.  

I rode into her life on a dragon. Y’know what I mean? 

I came in all blustering, breathing fire and burning up knights. I came in like something great and magical and ancient, with the power to blot out the sky, and drain the oceans in a single swallow. 

It was like a motorcycle made of living metals. It was like a swarm of crimson-coloured locusts, as beautiful and bloody as a red-skied sunset. It was like entering on a storm built of hurricanes and tidal waves.

I wanted to impress her, or maybe a bit more. Maybe I wanted to shake her to her core. If she wouldn’t love me, through and through and through, maybe I could still impress her, impress myself up on her, metaphorically speaking. 

Metaphorically speaking, she’d slain my dragon in a single night, with its hide pinned to the wall as a warning to others. I barely escaped with my dignity intact, though we did keep dating for a while.

If you know what I mean.