Comes Around

Typically people don’t have their arm trapped under the front tires of a truck, yet this was the situation presented to Ryan upon waking, and while he had chosen to sleep in a parking lot, he hadn’t expected to be confused for a parking place. It was a massive vehicle perched atop his unfortunate extremity, but his arm seemed to be numbed by the experience and thus it felt little more than dull pressure. While Ryan was fully aware that he couldn’t possible escape the truck’s rubber trap, he struggled futilely for a couple minutes as the situation seemed to demand. Newly exhausted from his impotent escape attempts, Ryan looked around for anyone in the immediate area who might have a jack or an idea of who parked with such callous disregard for others’ limbs. He recalled a number of homeless under the nearby ramada, the very same which prohibited Ryan from joining them and forcing him to sleep in the position he was now pinned to. However, they were gone, probably heading off to another park to hang around until the police caught wind. The park flanking this lot seemed to be completely empty, save for a fat man walking a sweater wearing pug on the sidewalk, drawing close to Ryan and the truck inconveniencing him. As the pug man came close enough for Ryan to shout for his attention, he stopped in his tracks, a shocked expression crossing his face as he surveyed Ryan’s predicament. As the man began to waddle over, small dog in tow, Ryan felt relieved that someone was willing to help him. As the man began to scream at Ryan, that relief vanished.
“What are you doing to my car?” The man demanded in his hitherto unrevealed nasally whine.
Ryan didn’t really have an answer to this, true, he was the one under the front wheels of a multi-ton, multi-thousand dollar truck, but he found it difficult to see how that could be his fault. At this point the man, now accompanied by the frantic yelpings of his wool-wrapped dog, repeated his accusation in far less affable terms.
“What the FUCK are you doing to my truck, you fucking bum?” Now the man’s voice, already as sonorous and deep as a swap meet violin savaging a cat, had jumped another octave skyward, any semblance of bass suffering heavy casualties along the way.
Ryan could only assume there was some other homeless guy doing something unspeakable to the truck just out of his vision, or this man was accusing him of violating the truck with his trapped arm.
“Um...” Ryan began, but was silenced by a yelp from the pug and its owner. The man’s face was a portrait of self-righteous anger.
“Don’t talk to me, you shit!” He squealed. “Now explain yourself!”
At this, Ryan decided to quietly wait for the man to contradict himself again and let the defense speak. As Ryan quietly waited, the man’s face began to inflate and redden with indignation, about to direct a broadside of fury towards his captive audience.
“Fine, you stupid asshole!” He cried out. “If you don’t want to talk to me, maybe you’ll talk to the cops! If you’re still here by the time Pugsworth and I get back here, you’ll be rotting in jail with all your other poor fucking bum friends!”
He trotted away, fuming and tugging his jumpered pug with neck-wrenching force, shouting various combinations of curses as he went, culminating in a “Fucker!” that would put an opera soprano to shame.
Ryan was unable to muster much interest in the man’s outburst. Seeing as how it didn’t have much to do with him in the first place, and that the man’s grasp on reality seemed tenuous at best, Ryan felt that any anger he directed at the man would have little effect on him. He looked over his chest, noticing an imprint of a shoe that could only be caused by someone stepping out of the truck above him. With it were four smaller paw prints with a similar origin.
As Ryan attempted to answer the age long question of just how oblivious people could be, a sedan sped through the mostly empty lot, slamming into the back of the truck and settling into a spot moments before another car pulled into it. The impact jerked the truck a few feet forward, liberating Ryan’s arm. Ryan stood, noting that while his formerly trapped extremity had as much feeling as an uninspired dance number, it was at least intact, which was more than he could say for the rear of his fiberglass jailor. The sedan, its owner now smugly leaving it as the car it cut off pulled into one of the many other spots, had pounded the truck bed’s door into a v-shape, crushed the bumper like a soda can, and folded the license plate into a piece of avant-garde origami. On the beaten bumper was a sticker that read: “Do unto other as you would have done unto yourself”.
Ryan contemplated this for a moment, then proceeded to piss in the truck’s gas tank and pop its tires with its own scrap metal.