Juxtaposition

Title is from here, if you were curious.

I'll love you more than you'll ever know

The snow kept coming down too hard that night. Cam didn't like the slippery, oily feel of the road beneath the wheels as he guided them with his hands. Johnny was in the backseat on his cell phone.

"Michelle," he said, "you know I love you. I love you more than you'll ever know." But he continued shouting at her, at the phone, at Cam, though Cam could not pay attention to him. A song came on the radio, a metal song unintelligible to Cam except as a percussive beat directly on his eardrum. The snow rushed past the windshield. It reminded him of when he was a child, when he and his sister would sit in the backseat and pretend that their old minivan was the Millennium Falcon and the snowflakes blowing past in the black night were stars in the cosmos, whooshing by. Cam took a deep breath through his nose, but instead of smelling that clean childhood scent of cold snow and the metallic smell of the zipper of his winter jacket, he smelled the alcohol on his breath and the vomit rising in the back of his throat. He closed his eyes and swallowed. When he opened them again, the twin beacons of the truck in the oncoming lane of traffic blinded him. He swerved and the world turned itself upside down several times. When it had stopped and all was still except for Johnny's wheezing sobs from the backseat, Cam stared at the bottle of Karkov vodka that had rolled into his line of sight and listened to the velvety strings of bass that rang throughout the car as the blood rushed to his head.

9/11/09