As promised last week, here’s another short story. This one is about a guy whose birthday gets ruined–or does it? I’d love to hear your input. And if you think of anyone who may enjoy this story, please consider sharing.

“Will you just move, already?” I tooted my horn. “It’s not gonna get any greener.”

I’m not usually a road rage kind of guy, but my normally relatively not-too-short fuse had taken quite a trimming that morning. A green Kia had been in my clearly labeled parking space, making me spend ten minutes looking for a spot, which in turn made me late to work. None of that would have been true, but I had left late because I had to clean up a steaming pile of vomit, lovingly left for me my on my brand new Navajo white living room rug by my dog. The cherry on top of the sundae–or so I thought–was getting back to my car at the end of the day to find a ticket under the windshielf wiper.

And thus my intolerance for the guy in front of me, who had the nerve to be talking to his daughter in the backseat, when he should have been waiting, eyes glued to the light, ready to floor it the instant it changed. Before I could honk again, though, brakes squealed behind me an instant before I found myself slammed back into my seat, followed by my car surging forward, despite my hitting the brakes, into the rear bumper of the car in front of me.

My head spinning more from the shock of the event than the magnitude of the impact, I unhooked my seatbelt and opened my door, thanking God that at least my airbag hadn’t deployed. The knife-stab in my back told me this was going to cost me some chiropractor visits, not to mention the time and trouble of getting my car reparied. I was consoling myself with the thought that at least it wasn’t my fault and would be paid for by someone else’s insurance, when my mind was jolted back to that morning. The car that rear-ended me was a Kia. A green Kia. Unless there were two cars of the exact shade with a puka shell necklace hanging from the rear-view mirror, the exact same green Kia that had parked in my clearly labeled parking spot, causing me to spend ten minutes hunting for another spot, causing me to be late AND to get the first parking ticket of my entire life. And did I mention this was my birthday? Yeah, happy birthday to me.

Funny. I’d always thought that whole seeing red thing was just a figure of speech. I learned that day it wasn’t. My entire field of vision turned crimson. I stalked–okay, I limped, but I did it angrily–back to the puke green Kia and was about to lay into the moron who had singlehandedly ruined my birthday, when out of the car climbed the most breathtakingly beautiful woman I had ever seen.